


The Three Point Plan

by hollo



Series: Nearer [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Bill Cipher POV, Cutting, Hijinks, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Multi, Possession, Self-Harm, dead things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-21 16:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3699452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollo/pseuds/hollo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The plan was simple yet solid - possess a body to avoid The Author's demon detectors, infiltrate the Mystery Shack, and steal the journals. The execution - not quite exactly as planned.<br/>BILL CIPHER POV<br/>tw: hints of self harm, implied suicide, though not a ton. there will probably be gore, and there will be dead things</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First venture into Gravity Falls. I don't have much to say, except to beg that you please review if you have the time.  
> Thank you for visiting!

The body was PERFECT. It would take ages of searching to find one as ideal as this one, but here Bill found it falling right into his lap.

Well, not exactly falling. It wasn't entirely chance that led him to the body - one handy knack of omnipotence was having a general sort of feel of people if one put their mind to it, and the feel of this one had drawn his attention before. That this chance had appeared so suddenly, and at the exact moment he needed it to, however, was nothing short of a galactic sized miracle. In all the horizons he could see the probability of this happening was buried deep beneath about forty hundred THOUSAND other probabilities. 

The body was young, but old enough to get around town without raising suspicion and without needing a job - sixteen, maybe seventeen? Eighteen? Human ages were confusing. The previous possessor had been an odd kid, running around in the woods and collecting dead things and coming back with injuries, more often than not self-inflicted; the kind of oddball child that, Bill knew from ages of harassing humans, was usually ignored and/or ridiculed in small communities like Gravity Falls, and wouldn't be paid much attention to. It was only a plus that he lived alone with his mother on the edge of the woods, and had been homeschooled the past few years once his eccentricities had become too much for the school system.

Bill eyed the body on the hospital bed gleefully. Carter Williams might have been an oddball, but he was a mostly physically fit oddball, with a body that was well capable of scaling walls and breaking into places, matters high on Bill's list of priorities for usable bodies. And now, he could bypass the whole 'strike a deal and invert souls' nonsense. Carter had taken one of his own skinning knives to his stomach, apparently wondering what disembowelment felt like. Now his soul was in that odd half-drift that souls went into when their body was in a coma, already detached from his body but unable to leave. Bill could see the thinnest of glittering strings holding Carter to his body - it took little effort to snap them, one by one. Each string grew taught as his finger pulled against it, then release with a snap and elastic spring, whirling into mist as it detached.

One by one Bill snapped them all, humming a cheerful tune as Carter's soul grew dimmer with each snap. The soul's death wouldn't matter much - what would he have been if he'd lived? A psychopath, Bill mused. A serial killer that gutted his victims with a smile on his face. That would've been Bill's preferred path for the kid; destruction had a glorious taste. But odds were that he would've ended up a loner, a hermit, one of those bearded half-men that grew dirty and wild in their lonely houses, eating animals raw and grunting instead of speaking.

Death had done the kid a massive favor.

The last thread snapped and swirled away, and the soul formerly known as Carter dissipated wisp by wispy wisp. Bill dabbed a tissue to his eye and waved fond farewell. 

As soon as the last wisp was gone, he pounced - into the body that had already been turning cold, restarting the sputtering heart valves and jumpstarting the neurons. The kid had been kept on a medical coma as his body pieced itself back together. Bill had no need for the coma; he needed recovery, fast. Too fast, though, and he'd have the Mystery Twins - and possibly worse than that, Stan-times-2 - to deal with.  

For the moment however, he set aside thoughts of recovery. He wanted to feel the body, to get to know it, to learn it so he could use it properly. There was no time to spend fumbling around like a drunk meatbag - he would need to start working as soon as possible.

So he plugged in, straight to the depths of the brain. Found it sluggish and unresponsive down to the neurons. The body wasn't much better - muscles were heavy, ligaments unyielding. That wouldn't do; whistling as he worked, he cut the coma meds, snapped the brain awake again. The sensory input went from null to full tap in a millisecond, flooding him with smells and sounds and pain. Pure unfiltered blissful pain of the kind only a physical body could experience. He chuckled to himself as the waves of pain rolled through the nerves and drowned the brain; wouldn’t you know, he'd cut the morphine from affecting the body too! For a long moment he reveled in the glorious sensation of sensation, the skin twitching agony that accompanied the rent flesh at his midsection. He could laugh with the joy of it, only he couldn't. There was a tube stuck down his throat that made laughing a bit difficult, though it gave the oddest rasping sensation as his throat muscles convulsed in unrestrained attempted-laughter.

Too much of a good thing does a body bad, however, and reluctantly Bill turned the morphine back on and felt the sharpness of the pain fade back to a dull ache. Having taken care of that, he set to fixing the wounds the previous possessor had so carefully enacted on the body. Not too much, he reminded himself as he worked. Let them think it's amazing, but not a miracle. So he stitched the inner organs first where the knife had glanced across them, and then stitched the abdominal lining to keep the guts inside. Finally he pulled the skin together, only a bit, with the thinnest spider web of tissue. There were other injuries, a few scrapes here or there, a bruise, a bump, but he ignored anything that wasn't life threatening. Once satisfied with the level of healing, he gave the body a twitch. Everything was responsive, though heavy. Very heavy. Heavier than the free floating multi dimensional body he was used to. What was the deal with gravity, anyways? Ridiculous.  
He snorted a chuckle, then reached out his powers and set the alarms off on the machines still connected to the body. All of them. The sudden clamor in the hallways, accompanied by the sounds of ear piercing rapid fire beeps, was music to his ears.  
 

* * *

 

It was a week before the doctors were convinced that Bill's body was well enough to go home. He'd spent most of it testing the body's limits, learning to deal with gravity again, and dissecting Carter's memories so he could play his part adequately. There wasn't much to learn - Carter was an eccentric loner with a masochistic streak a mile wide. It was all well within Bill's repertoire and he was looking forward to put his skills to use.

Now that he had finally left the hospital he found himself given free reign; Carter's mother, a stout and determined woman in her forties, worked two jobs tirelessly, most of it going to cover whatever expenses her son had accrued. This left plenty of time for Bill to start working on his plan - and the sooner the better. He'd lost a week in the hospital - he'd hoped to use the chaos left by the multiple gravity fissures caused by the portal to better maneuver himself. This was Gravity Falls, though; gravity anomalies, earth rending earthquakes, were practically part of the norm. While there was destruction and injuries, the chaos was limited and scattered. People had gone back to their normal routine as soon as it was apparent the freak event was over.

That he could deal with - it wasn't an essential part of his plan. What he needed to do, number one, was infiltrate the Mystery Shack. Now that The Author was back, however, he needed to be extra careful. The last time they'd met, the man had somehow bewitched a pair of glasses to be able to see demons, even when they had made themselves invisible to physical lifeforms. It was how he'd thwarted Bill's last attempts at getting hold of the journals. Just thinking of it pissed Bill off to no end.

Now he was ready, or part ready at least, to finally get what he’d wanted for so long. He was in a body, which he believed should void the glasses' power, or distort his demonic presence enough that he wouldn't be noticed. But The Author would be crafty and Bill would need to go in prepared.

Which was why he took a trip to the Mystery Shack the first day he was out.

The sun was out, bathing everything in a golden glow that made his eyes water. He wasn't too sure about the sun, and stars in general - not like he was paranoid or something, but he had a feeling they knew more than they let on. He tried to glare at the sun to show it he wasn't falling for the innocent act, but human eyes were apparently not made for staring into bright objects. Half of his walk to the shack he had bright colored orbs floating in his vision. 

He reached the shack after about an hour, though he probably would've reached it sooner if he hadn't stopped to poke a roadkill raccoon with a stick and laugh uproariously at the squishy sounds it made.

It gave him no end of pleasure to see the shack in disarray. The letters were askew, the siding had fallen off in some places, and the roof shingles had been loosened in some places so badly they rattled in the wind. Bill hoped that the humans had been so engrossed in their repairs that they'd get a little lax with their vigilance.

As he stood there, standing half behind a bush that reached to his chin, a tour bus pulled up into the clearing in front of the shack. He watched, amused, as people poured out, looking around in awe and anticipation. Some pointed with wonder at the totem pole, leaning slightly since the anomalies passed through, while others engrossed themselves in taking pictures of the shack’s goat. He could've lit his hands in fire and caused the sky to turn orange and they would've called him a hack, but show them a badly taxidermy rabbit with pronghorn antlers and they'd be climbing over each other to throw money at you. Humans. What was their deal?

The group migrated towards the shack, which was surprisingly open despite the damage. No doubt The Hustler would be taking advantage of the freaky events to hawk new wares. It mattered little to Bill - he was more interested in the fact that he had a perfect way of getting inside, and getting a feel for the place in a physical way. Not only that, he was itching to see if the wards and sigils The Author had put up in certain areas of the shack still applied to him when he was in a human body. If the human body allowed him to bypass those protective spells....

He must've been grinning a little too wildly as he neared the group, as a few of the tourists eyed him warily, and a mother pulled her small child away from him. He laughed, but checked himself - he didn't want to draw too much attention, he reminded himself, even if seeing terror blossom on faces WAS one of his favorite things. Playing the good boy, he headed inside the shack after the others.

The inside was a wreck, but not, he noticed, a wrecked wreck. It was artistically arranged, beams laying _there_ to not impede foot traffic, a crack in the wall _there_ , strategically placed here where eyes were drawn to it. And at the center of it all, The Hustler; distraught and slightly bedraggled, yet putting on a brave front - lamenting the damage done to his life's work and hoping for the best. All while discretely pointing out a donation bucket located nearby, into which coins and bills fell in a near constant stream out of the hands of teary eyed tourists.

Bill had to hand it to the guy - he could work a crowd like no other. Well, not including Bill. An entire underground association spanning hundreds of years didn't choose him as their symbol just for the hell of it.  
He wasn't there for sightseeing, no matter how interesting humans were with their odd faces and odd voices and their ridiculous need to be upended by absolute crock. Besides, his body was beginning to come off the pain meds he'd taken that morning. He liked pain, but apparently it was a hindrance to physical forms in some manner. He’d rather have liked to heal himself fully, but Carter’s mother was vigilant for the few hours she was home, and she kept a sharp eye on his injuries. A miraculous healing would have been noticed much too quickly.

"Carter?"

Was that him? He'd almost forgotten, but only almost. He turned with a grin to face the person who'd called out to him. A little behind him stood a teenaged girl, with long red hair and lazy grin on her face. She was definitely Gravity Falls stock – lumberjack hat and plaid shirt and muddy boots.

"Uh, hey," Bill responded, flipping through the memories on his brain. Did Carter know her? Yes he did. They'd even been maybe friends, before Carter went off the deep end. "Hey Wendy."

"Heard you got out of the hospital recently." She said, maybe slightly hesitantly. That seemed an odd way to start a conversation, like, “Oh hey, heard a horde of mind flayers recently cleared out your quadrant of the mindspace continuum.” Maybe it wasn’t such an odd conversation starter; if Bill remembered correctly, that was how he’d greeted the demon from two and five-eights a dimension over the last time they me. He grinned.

"Yeah, I still have some healing to do, but look," Bill said cheerfully, pulling up his shirt to reveal the jagged half-circle still etched into his stomach with its black thread stitching. "I have two mouths!"

"Ha ha, yeah..." Wendy said queasily. Bill almost didn't notice the uneasy look on her face, mainly because he was making his stomach mouth wiggle and it was hilarious.

"Right " he said, dropping his shirt. "How are you?"

"Not too bad." Wendy said, looking relieved. "How... about you? Your mom said you were... feeling better?"

She did that weird thing humans did with their hands, sort of a wavy, hands spread out motion. Honestly, Bill was a master of wordcraft but sometimes the way humans beat around the bush, with their words and their actions, made human conversation confusing. Better? How better? Physically? Obviously, but that was _obvious_ and she was hinting at something _not_ so obvious, and he considered the thought that she might mean mentally...

His gears whirred and clicked and he realized he could use this question to his advantage - he wouldn't have to keep up the "Carter is really weird he plays with dead things and hits himself with hammers" farce if he played it right. He could put his energies to better use instead!

"I really do," He said emphatically. "Those earthquakes, and the hospital stay... I don't know what happened, but it's almost as if I have this clarity now, like my brain is just clear. No fuzz on the edges."

"That’s great." Wendy said, and she meant it. Her smile was genuine. "Hey, you know, if you're feeling up to it, some of us are having a get together by the old quarry tonight. I mean, I know you're still recovering and stuff but, it'd be cool to have you back among your people, you know?"

Wendy gave him a playful smile that left Bill wondering if he'd read this Carter kid right. People usually didn't invite social outcasts to parties, did they? Was this a weird human thing? As far as he could tell in the kid’s head, he’d been living a wild life away from his ‘people’ for a long time.

"It sounds fun," he said. "I'll try to make it."

"Cool," Wendy grinned, "Well, I'll see you then. Gotta get my butt back to work before the boss man notices me loitering."

Bill waved as she walked back to The counter, then turned back to the shack. Most of the tourist group had headed into the back, following The Hustler as he led them on the tour. Hurrying after them, Bill was able to join the tour, which gave him a good chance to take a look around the bottom rooms of the shack. Curiously, neither Pine Tree nor Shooting Star made an appearance; were they with The Author, possibly? Thoughts of what they could be up to in the upper - or lower! - rooms of the shack rolled round and round on Bill's mind. There was no chance he'd be able to check out the rest of the house in broad daylight, with tour groups all about and The Hustler in attendance. He'd have a better chance at night, no doubt.

Night. His thoughts brightened; of course. The old quarry was just a fifteen minute walk to the northwest from the shack. There could be no better excuse for him to be wandering around the area than that. He'd show up to the party, do his human duty of this 'hanging out' thing, then swing around to the shack and sneak inside to take a look. It was brilliant.

Happily, fine plan in mind, he ended the tour with the rest of the group and, with a wry grin and chuckle, tossed a dollar in the donation jar.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second chapter to wet your appetite! The next one will finally get to the twins-times-two, including a little pine scented dream scene, but you'll have to wait a bit for it. Planning for a Saturday night upload - be there or be square! And we all know how much Bill hates squares...
> 
> On an off note, isn't it funny how fondness makes the heart grow distant? Or was it the other way around...
> 
> p.s. if you're ever in the mood to bother me, feel free to find me on tumbler at itsdetachable.tumblr.com

Bill spent most of the remainder of the day on bed, letting his body rest as he ran through the brain he inhabited, again. He missed things, he realized, and he had to reevaluate Carter's social status. It was vital he knew his body if he was supposed to keep from raising suspicion.

He discovered that Carter wasn't viewed as a social pariah, an eccentric outcast - but as a troubled teen. He wasn't lonely, despite being a loner; his circle of friends included other Gravity Falls teens like Wendy and Nate, or at least it did before he started being homeschooled. Even that wasn't because of some nefarious eccentricities or budding psychopathy, as Bill had imagined - the kid had reached a breaking point in anxiety and developed a deep depression, and homeschooling was the only option left for him. 

The dead things he collected were just that, dead things he liked and collected. His frequent escapes into the woods were an attempt to control his anxiety and depression in a healthy way.

His self-injury, at least, was some form of masochism, Bill was relieved to find. Not everything he'd surmised about the kid been incorrect. 

It just didn't make sense to him, however, this anxiety and depression. Fear was a natural, innate response, but Carter's fears were illogical, based in some fantasy that even Carter himself didn't believe in. So why? Bill flipped the pages of his memories, wandered down hallways of past paths, called up images and videos, play by plays of years and years...

It wasn't until he stepped outside the imagery-representation of Carter's mind that he saw it. Desperate to find an answer, pissed as hell that he wasn't able to connect the dots as they were, he slammed shut the book of the kid's mind and sat floating among the pseudo ether of his physical brain.

Neurons fired. Electrical charges sent flickers from end to edge to edge to end. Receptors recepted, except... Bill squinted, in an ethereal presence sort of way, and saw that the receptors were dinky. The flickering unflickered in places, and over flickered in others. The very structure of the neurons was odd in places. It was as if...

The brain was broken?

Bill was flabbergasted. He liked that word, flabbergasted. It was as utterly confounding as this whole physical brain deal. Why did human fleshbags have to be so complicated? He forced the body awake and rolled off the bed and directly onto the floor because he forgot that he was not floating but instead tied to the earth with an invisible rubber band. He would've at least chuckled about the crash and the puff of air the fall knocked out if him if he hadn't been so preoccupied with being angry about human anatomy. What a waste of atoms!

What was worse was he had _never_ known about this brain thing. The physical aspect of a human's brain affected their being! But how? Bill decided the only way to find out was to search it on the internet, a kind of human communal mindmeld accessed only through electronic portals. Another waste of atoms; humans should've just developed telepathy or matter transference and made it easier on themselves.

He scraped himself up off the floor and made it halfway to the desk before he realized that evening had fallen. The party, and his plans, came rushing back to him - much more important than figuring out what brains were made of was taking the chance at infiltrating the Mystery Shack.

He ransacked the kid's brain for a hint of what to do; he couldn't afford to be conspicuous if he was trying to avoid unwanted attention. A shower was necessary, which almost dragged on too long once he realized soap bubbles made a delightful stinging sensation upon entering his eyes. Then it was time to dress in clothes, which were still somewhat baffling to him. Why? Whatever the answer was, he needed them, and not the whatever-came-to-hand outfit he had been wearing up to that point. Instead he went with what looked like Carter's favorite, a black-blue-gray striped baggy long sleeved shirt, a dark blue hooded vest, jeans with scuff marks on the knees and a pair of black canvas sneakers.

Carter's mom wasn't home - she worked a night shift as a waitress in a 24 hour diner - so Bill let himself out and started hiking to the quarry. Darkness wasn't really made for human eyes, or was it the other way around? Either way he couldn't cut through the trees and yards like he had earlier, but had to walk the streets.

A few blocks over he ran into Wendy as he was crossing the street. She grinned when she saw him.

"Come on, let's walk to Robbie's house, he'll give us a ride down there," She said, and led the way to the funeral home. Honestly, it may have been one of Bill's favorite places in Gravity Falls - all those dead humans just waiting for a passing demon to up and possess them. He'd done his share of scaring the crap out of mourners - fond memories, indeed.

Now he got to experience the funeral home at a physical first hand - Mrs. Valentino let them in to wait for Robbie in the front parlor, but curiosity led Bill to wander into a nearby hallway and towards a back door. 

"Where're you going?" Wendy asked, though she followed a few steps behind him.

"You ever been back here?" Bill asked, and she grinned.

"No." Wendy leaned towards him and in a conspiratorial whisper added, "I think it’s where they keep the dead people while they're getting them ready."

Bill grinned. It most definitely was. Shooting a quick glance around to make sure no one saw them, he pushed open the back door and headed into the room, Wendy on his heels.

It was large, and chillier than the rest of the house. The back wall was half glistening metal, into which a few doors were set. Cooled meat puppets waiting for someone to pull their strings and make them dance waited beyond - three of them. Bill could see past the doors if he squinted - there was some distortion of his powers when he was in a body - but it didn't take much effort to see the meatsicles in their refrigerated nook.

"Woah," Wendy said with a laugh. She was wandering along the other side of the room, looking over the neatly laid out tools and jars. Bill headed over to the far wall, where a cart was positioned against the wall. A series of large bottles stood on top, and next to them an odd looking machine that reminded Bill of a very large blender, with the knobs at the front and a big glass canister at the top. Hoses of different lengths were coiled next to it, and a series of odd looking tubular contraptions were arranged at the front of the cart. The Valentino's definitely liked things neat and tidy - Bill swatted at the tubes and set them all askew, grinning. No more pretty arrangement!

"Guys?" A voice reached them, and Bill turned to see Robbie standing in the doorway, looking morose as usual. Bill was somewhat acquainted with the kid, or at least his dreams - what a blast those were! 

"Hey Robbie," Wendy said casually, leaning back against the counter. "What's up?"

"What are you doing in here?" Robbie said, shifting uneasily. Bill grinned widely.

"Paying our respects," Bill said, motioning to the doors on the wall. Wendy gave a slightly nervous laugh, while Robbie paled paler than the pale he had been. Bill was crowing in delight inside - fear was great, especially etched so clearly on a human's face.

"Right, so, we going?" Robbie motioned towards the front of the house. Wendy chuckled and pushed away from the counter, and Bill made to follow, but something interesting entered his sight. Something tantalizing - a large jar, sitting on a back corner of the counter far away from anything else, labeled "Do Not Touch - Medical Waste". Inside, a gorgeous mixture of red and white clouds drifted in a pale amber solution. Bill honestly had no idea what it was, but it looked delicious, in a terror inducing sort of way.

He had to touch it.

So he did, crossing over to the counter and poking the jar with his finger.

"What's this?" He asked. With each poke the liquid inside shivered.

"Ugh, don't... Don't touch that..." Robbie sounded grossed out.

"Dude, what is it though?" Wendy asked. Bill had moved from poking the jar to turning it round and round, watching the cloudiness spin in its solution. He was only vaguely aware that someone was walking across the room towards him.

"It’s nothing, all right?" Robbie's voice was near him now, and Bill grabbed the jar, one hand on the jar and one on the lid. It was way too easy to unscrew the top discretely - did he dare? Would he do it? His entire being trembled with delightful anticipation. It wouldn't be the first time he'd scared the crap out of the kid; corpses didn't moan in the night or bang on the doors all by themselves!

"Seriously can you just leave it alone?" Robbie definitely sounded aggravated now.

"What, this?" 

Bill had left the loosened lid on the jar, and made sure to spin - just right - so the sloshing liquid lifted the lid and splashed right out onto Robbie and all across the front of his hoodie.

For a second there was silence, and then Wendy gasped in half-laughing shock. Bill had to work hard to maintain a carefully surprised and adequately remorseful look - inside he was rolling on the figurative floor with laughter. Robbie stood frozen for a long moment, a mixture of revulsion and horror on his face.

"I'm SO sorry." Bill managed to utter in what he hoped was a suitably apologetic tone. He placed the jar back on the counter, minus half its liquid; the clunk of the glass on granite seemed to break Robbie out of his petrification. Hurriedly he tore his soaked hoodie off of himself and held it out at arm's length, eyeing it with disgust.

"Oh!" Bill exclaimed cheerfully. "You have scars!"

Robbie froze for the second time. Wendy coughed.

"Let me see," Bill grabbed at the kid’s arms and pulled them closer.

"Seriously, we should be going..." Robbie said hurriedly, trying to pull his arms away. Bill's grip was too strong, however, and he pulled Robbie's arms closer.

"No, look," Bill said with glee, pushing up his own sleeves. He held out his arms between Robbie's, their edges touching, so that they went Robbie-Bill-Robbie-Bill. It was a perfect inverse pattern, Robbie's pale skin and slightly darker scars and Bill's (Carter's?) brown skin and pale scars. Pain made a glorious tapestry, Bill thought. He looked at Robbie with glee.

"We match!"

Robbie was avoiding his gaze, face flushed.

"Uh, yeah..." He muttered, his eyes flickering to Bill's face then away again. Humans! Bill thought with an inward laugh, embarrassed over the oddest things!

"Come on," Wendy said, suddenly appearing at Bill's side. She grabbed his arm and pulled him away, walking towards the door.

"We'll be by the car." She called back to Robbie as she physically steered Bill outside.  
It wasn't long before Robbie came out, dressed in a different hoodie.

"Sit in back, I'm picking Tambry up too," the dark haired teen said as he unlocked the doors and they piled into the sedan, and they were off.

\--

It wasn't much of a place, the quarry, Bill decided as he looked out over the jagged earth and discarded stones. It was boring, really, and his feet itched to get a move on, get to the shack and peer inside. Wendy was busy re-introducing him to everyone, however, so he sucked in his impatience and did his best to power through until he had a chance to sneak off. He even managed to remain focused after Thompson produced a case of beer he'd brought along, his desperate attempt to please his friends earning him approving shouts and pats on the back. Alcohol made a human brain fuzzy, Bill knew, but he was more than prepared for it - he'd been there when the first brew brewed itself into being, haha. So he let himself kick back a little, can in hand, and prepared himself mentally for the task ahead.

He'd need a way into the shack; earlier he'd noticed one of the second story windows was slightly crooked in its frame. There was the possibility it could be coaxed to open easily, or pushed inside, if he managed to get up there. The issue was his human body - no floating capabilities there. Gravity was a horrible tease, just a little less of it and humans could at least jump easier, float through the air when necessary... The problem of reaching the second story in a still-sort of-injured body was something he needed to solve before he reached the shack, so he focused on it intently as he wracked his memories for every detail of the outside facade of the shack as he'd seen it earlier in the day 

That is, he was focused until Nate and Lee dragged a pile of dead wood into the middle of the shallow rock quarry and produced bottles of lighter fluid.

"Who wants to do the honors?!" Nate called out as Lee whooped and shook the bottles in the air.

"Ooh! Me!" Bill said excitedly, scurrying over to them.

"Carterrrr, making a come baaaack," Nate laughed and slapped Bill on the shoulder so hard he nearly bowled right over. Lee handed him a bottle, and Bill opened it eagerly, spraying the contents over the pile of dry wood. Fire! Who could resist?

Nate produced a lighter, and Bill grabbed a branch that lay nearby. Dousing the end in lighter fluid, he held it out and Nate held the lighter to the tip. Flames leapt into life, crackling at the end of the branch, and Bill watched the flickering flames, fading and deepening in intensity, happily. It wasn't as glorious as his own fires, but it was pretty damn gorgeous. He wanted to shove his face into the yellow-orange glow and bask in its heat as his skin melted off his skull.

"I feel," Lee said suddenly, serious or at least pretending it. "I feel, something needs to be said so... Hold that up Carter!"

Bill, perplexed and amused, held the branch up high.

"For summer!" Lee yelled, holding his can high, "May it never end!"

Whoops and cheers followed, and Bill thrust the flaming branch into the bonfire. A whoosh of hot air burst out from it, shrieks and laughter following, as the soaked wood burst into a fireball.

"That was great bro," Nate said, patting Lee on the arm.

"Thanks bro," Lee said with a sigh. "I try, you know."

Bill chortled. That was a great word, chortle. He watched the fireball grow, the flames licking at branch after branch, eating up the kindling. Destruction was gorgeous, was it not? The energy released by the flames wafted through the air like a myriad fireflies, glittering and dancing on unseen drafts. The humans couldn't see it, but he could, that glimmering iridescence of matter turned into energy, proof that destruction was just another rebirth, evidence of the multiverse's ability to recycle anything and everything. Humans saw flames and saw limited power, destructive but brief, a burst of color and heat and then black ash. How blind they were to the intricacies of the world that surrounded them, Bill mused, sipping from his can.

Bill mused for so long he'd forgotten what he was musing about. Alcohol shouldn't have affected him, but a sluggish physical brain seemed to inhibit his non-physical one. What a pain. He glanced around, realizing that the night had grown even darker while he'd been lost in thought. Nate and Lee were harassing each other on the far side of the fire, while Wendy and Thompson had lined up cans on a rocky ledge and were attempting to knock them over with stones. Just beyond the edge of the fire light Tambry and Robbie were making out in an absolutely messy-drunk sort of way.

Everyone was accounted for, and no one was paying attention to him. Perfect. With a smirk, Bill edged around to the far side of the fire, then climbed his way out of the quarry. The sides were low and full of handy ledges, and he was soon ducking into the forest. It wasn’t far to his destination, and he scurried along with barely contained anticipation, humming a cheerful tune as he went.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a bad day, so I decided to post WAY earlier than planned.  
> Enjoy!
> 
> If you ever feel like bothering me, come over to http://itsdetachable.tumblr.com

The hike to the Mystery Shack took longer than he'd anticipated, and tired his body out more than he'd have liked. Who knew bushes and tree roots could be so damaging? Even with his demon vision nightlighting his surroundings, it took a good half hour of stumbling around the near dark, but finally he reached the shack.

As far as he could tell, it was dark inside. No lights flickered behind windows, no sounds could be heard. He creeped around to the back, and eyed the window on the second floor that he had noticed earlier. Some of the planks of the wall were loose enough for him to grab hold of, but would they be so loose he'd pull them off and fall to the ground as well? He considered attempting to lift his body through the air, but pushed the thought aside. Last time he tried to make a physical body float, he dropped it into the river he was trying to float over.

Stepping forward, Bill grabbed hold of one of the boards and pulled at it. The wood held, and gingerly he lifted himself up, his feet scrabbling at the wall for purchase. The body wasn't a cliff climbing champion, but Bill was glad to see it was well capable even with its injuries, so far, of scaling walls. He continued heaving himself up by finding finger- and foot-holds in the loosened planks. Where there were none, he made them with the help of some demon magic, gently prying the boards away until there was enough for him to grab hold of. The climb was excruciating, but he made it to the window, and after a quick glance saw his suspicions were correct - the window was unable to be locked or latched, and sat loosely in it'd frame, so with a push he was able to lift it open. Grinning eagerly, he slid in through the window and onto the floor inside as quietly as a prowling cat. Bill liked cats. He especially liked the way they screeched when he yanked them up by their tails.  
The house was dark, but not silent. He could hear voices from below, and he crept as quietly as he could to the head of the stairs. He could hear the voices better, but he couldn't see a thing, and he was wary of heading downstairs. The chances of him being spotted would be significantly higher.

Frustrated, he grumbled to himself and focused on intensifying his demon sight. The floor beneath him became a hazy mist, and he looked through it to find the source of the voices. Peering into the rooms below him he saw four figures crowded around the kitchen table. At this distance there were a couple walls between them and him so he couldn't make them out clearly. Seeing where they were helped immensely, however. Maybe he could find a way to stay upstairs and still listen in...

Stalking back through the hallway, he discovered that directly above the kitchen was the upstairs bathroom. He stepped inside and took a critical look around - he didn't want to be trapped up there without an escape plan. While the room was full of the basics - bathtub, sink, toilet, etc - it also had a regular sized window on the far wall. Testing it, he found it moved smoothly, and he propped it open and looked outside. There were no easy handholds at this part of the wall, but that didn't bother him much. If he was forced to jump, he would, body be damned. It would hardly be a hindrance - he could just repair the damage and be on his way in seconds.

Having plotted his escape, he got down to business - the four were directly below him, and if he wanted to eavesdrop successfully he'd need to be able to hear them clearly. Carefully rolling up the bathroom rug, he put it aside and inspected the floorboards. Right in the middle of the room was a gap between two boards, and with the gentle prodding of magic he was able to widen it to almost an inch. Laying on the floor as comfortably as he could, and now able to hear the voices much more clearly, he put his eye to the hole and took in the sight below.

The only light in the room was a single lamp hanging above the table. The shutters on the windows were closed tight, which was why Bill hadn't seen any light when he'd been circling the house 

There were four at the table - The Author looking slightly disheveled and wary, The Hustler looking tired and cranky, Shooting Star looking cheerful yet still shooting worried glances around the table, and Pine Tree looking harried and overwhelmed. For the first time Bill saw PT without his hat on his head - instead the kid has his fingers in his hair, clenching it like a lifeline.

"It still doesn't matter." Dipper exclaimed, dropping his hands to the table and giving the others an angry look. "Just because nothing "bad" happened in Gravity Falls doesn't mean it didn't happen somewhere else in the world. There could be a volcano that woke up somewhere near a big city! People weren't hurt hear, but they could've been hurt somewhere else..."

"Listen kid, it all ended good. Why do you haveta keep making a big deal of it?" Stan said with a groan.

"Yeah Dipper, look, now we have TWO Grunkles," Mabel exclaimed happily, beaming at the Author. He seemed a little dismayed by the nickname, but didn't object to it. 

"Listen, Dipper is right, there could have been complications," The Author said. Bill was surprised to hear his voice, less scratchy than that of his twin, younger sounding. Barely changed from the last time Bill had heard him.

"But they didn't occur, let's be grateful for that." The Author sighed deeply. He still looked a little shell shocked; his reappearance in the world must've taken its toll on him in the past few days.

"Okay, besides that," Dipper said, placing his hands flat on the table. "Something else has been bothering me. The portal distorted gravitational fields, right? Could it distort... You know, reality? Too?"

"Whaddya mean?" Stan asked.

"Could it rip into the, the fabric of reality? Somehow?" Dipper looked distraught over the idea.

"Maybe," The Author said quietly, looking pensive. "Maybe, but if it had done that, it wouldn't have stopped with just rips - the distortion would have destabilized the world completely at that point."

"Okay," Dipper took a deep breath. "Good."

He still looked worried, though. For a moment they all sat there in silence, the only sound the tap of Mabel's feet against the chair legs as she swung them back and forwards. There was a curious look on her face, and after a moment, when it seemed that the discussion was over, she blurted out,

"What about Bill?"

"Bill?" Stan asked, squinting in slight confusion.

Dipper shared a look with Mabel, one of those twin looks.

"Yeah, what about Bill." Dipper repeated.

"He was so, you know, into us not getting information on the Author and stuff, but now there was ALL this CHAOS-" Mabel waved her arms in the air, setting the sparkles on her sweater glittering. "And he's not around."

"Maybe he got scared that the Author came back." Dipper said with a forced chuckle.

"No," The Author said, eyes flickering around the room, then towards the ceiling. Bill stiffened; The Author had his glasses on, Bill could see the magic pulsing inside the lenses. If his plan was faulty, now was the moment he would find out.

But The Author's eyes moved past him, and he relaxed again.

"Bill wouldn't let a chance like that slip by. He isn't scared of me-" Damn right, thought Bill, "-only wary. He's planning something. He must be."

"But what? The journals have already been put to use, the portal was opened, and you've come back," Dipper said. "He tried to stop it and he failed, what else does he want?"

"Other than being summoned to get inside people’s heads or use them as puppets." Mabel added helpfully.

"Yeah, other than that," Dipper laughed wearily.

For a moment, it seemed that The Author would respond - his face darkened, his mouth stiffened into a grim like. Bill plastered himself to the floor, holding his breath; would he finally find out just how much The Author knew?

Then the man's expression changed, he shook his head once, decisively, and with a sigh pushed away from the table.

"That's a discussion for another day." He said, "I think its high time we all got our butts to bed."

"I hear that." Stan said, rising to his feet with a groan. "Come on, kids."

Mabel hopped off of her chair, scurrying around it to give her brother, then Stan, and then The Author, a hug good night. Dipper remained seated, however, looking lost in thought.

"You coming, bro bro?" Mabel asked cheerfully.

"Uh, yeah, I'll be up in a minute." Dipper responded with a forced smile.

"Don't stay up too late," Stan said gruffly, then grabbed Mabel's shoulder when it seemed she was going to stay behind and steered her out of the kitchen. 

Bill lifted his head from the floor warily and eyed the half open bathroom door. He wanted to know what Pine Tree was up to, but he knew any moment now the other three would be walking by on their way to bed. Already he could hear their footsteps on the stairs.

And all Dipper was doing was sitting there, staring forlornly at nothing. Bill bit his lip in frustration - the footsteps were getting closer, and he thought he heard Stan mention the word "bathroom". As quickly and quietly as he could, he rose to his feet and put the rug back where it belonged. With barely moments to spare, he hauled himself out if the window headfirst. The light flicked on a second after his departure, but he had little time to care for how close he came to being discovered - gravity continued to hate him and the ground was rushing towards him sickeningly fast. He barely managed to hold his hands out in front of him and magic a puff of air between himself and the ground before he hit it face first. What a rush - he avoided severe injury but his face and arms ached and his stomach felt as if the second smile had opened up to laugh at him. Groaning, he rolled over and looked up - no one was peering out the windows, so he hadn't made much noise at least.   
Putting his powers to work, he healed himself up and rolled to his feet. It was going to be a long walk home, but he had a plan in mind. They were expecting Bill to take advantage of the situation? Then he would, and exactly in the way they anticipated - dreams and nightmares and suspicious deals. He realized now his absence was the most conspicuous part of his plan, so he'd give them what they expected in order to further mask his true intentions.

Always one step ahead, he thought gleefully.

 

Once back at Carter's house he went through human routines quickly and methodically. The bathroom was the most important, he'd drunk more beer than he'd realized and his bladder was about to burst halfway back to his house. After, he tossed his clothes off and put the body to bed, switching the brain to sleep mode as he prepared himself.

Dream delving was simple for demons - most any demon could do it. Bill wasn't just any demon, however, and his dream delving was less delving, more total manipulation. Few demons became skilled in dreams, but Bill was so pro he made the pros look like amateurs. Dream delving was much easier when you didn't have to detach yourself from a human body, though, and Bill had really connected himself to his puppet. Still, it was little issue for him to pull his strings and feelers out of the body, and he detached into his own ethereal self shortly after setting Carter's body to sleep. 

He wasted little time, but floated straight out of the room and skipped three hazy mid-planes right and immaterial plane forward to skip directly to the shack instead of floating to it through the physical world.   
He avoided the top rooms - The Author was there, and he needed to avoid his gaze. True, he could've found dreams through mind space, but he was curious as to what Dipper had remained behind in the kitchen for, and hoped that even if the kid wasn't asleep, he'd be able to find that out at least.

He got more than he expected; Dipper was asleep at the table, face down on the open pages of one of the journals. Bill's fingers itched - so close! - as he neared the kid. He couldn't clearly see the pages, even when looking through Dipper's head, but he didn't waste time on that. Memories came into dreams easily, and he could coax the kid's mind into bringing up the information he'd been looking at before falling asleep   
Bill focused, and shifted his multiverse view around until the dream plane overlapped the real world in a milky cloud. It was a simple matter to float over then, and with a wave of his hand the clouds parted and he entered Pine Tree's dreams.

Wendy. Of course. And Dipper. Saving her from some monster or creature or other nightmarish beast. Bill rolled his eye; he had no time for human procreative shenanigans. At this point the kid could write a whole series of sappy romance action novels. Dipper Pines, Harlequin's rising star author! Bill laughed at the thought   
With a nudge and then a hard shove, Bill shifted Dipper's dreams away from Wendy and monsters and towards the journals. What was Dipper studying so intently that he fallen  asleep face first in the book? Recent memories dredged up slowly - Dipper floated from a heroic stance to his present sitting in a chair stance. The book lay open before him, and Bill floated over to peer over the kid's shoulder. 

It was a map, one Bill hadn't seen yet. It must've been from one of the first two journals, as there was more written in The Author's typical black ink than in the invisible ink. The mess of overlapping lines and hastily written ciphers must've been boggling the kid's mind; Bill watched as he scratched his head, squinting at the symbols and sighing in frustration. It was much simpler for Bill; with a wave of his hand, he pulled the images off the pages and reconstructed them in the air, in glorious three dimensions. The overlapping lines seperated and grew out and up and down, forming less of a mess and more of a coherent structure.

"What the-" Dipper jerked upright, staring at the floating ink lines. His eyes narrowed, and he spun to face the demon. "Bill! I knew you'd be back."

"Well hello Pine Tree, did you miss me?" Bill laughed. "I was passing by and thought I'd see how my favorite human is doing."

It was disgusting how true those words were, and Bill would be the first to admit it. He had a soft spot somewhere in his metaphysical bricks for Dipper, maybe it was the kid's fierce determination, maybe his fortitude in the face of his own weakness. Maybe it was the way the kid bawled like a baby when Bill made his dream-Wendy dump him after he'd saved her from a monster. Whatever it was, the kid had potential - potential the demon would love to get his hands on...

But not right then, not yet. For now, Bill would make do with his current plans.

"Don't mind me, juuust taking a looksie," Bill said, and with a flourish set the image spinning in the air.

"No!" Dipper stood up in his chair and waved his arms over his head, distorting the lines of the image. "I don't know what you're up to but you are NOT using ME to do it."

Bill laughed, transforming the kitchen into a canyon and Dipper's chair into a thin pinnacle of stone. The kid wobbled on the narrow tip, crying out as he nearly fell right off.

"Watch your step, the way downs a bit steep!" Bill laughed, swirling round and round Dipper as he finally regained his balance. He glared at Bill darkly.

"This isn't funny." Dipper said.

"You know what would be funny?" Bill said in a suggestive whisper. "If you took a step forward and we found out what really happens if you don't wake up before you hit bottom."

Bill nudged Dipper with his elbow. 

"Eh,Eh? Whaddya say?"

"No! Do you think I'm stupid?" Dipper exclaimed, and attempted to push Bill away. 

"Oh Pine Tree," Bill said with a chuckle as Dipper passed right through him and fell off the pinnacle. "You're a RIOT."

Bill followed the kid on his downward spiral, quite enjoying the screams reverberating round the canyon, and inspected the three dimensional drawing closely. It was the Mystery Shack, and beneath it were a series of rooms and tunnels. One large one was the portal room, but there were tantalizing open ended tunnels in various places that set Bill's mind a-whirling. Were their underground passageways into the shack? How fun! They might be demon proofed with warding sigils, which was why Bill had no knowledge of them. This called for a serious investigation. 

"Thanks for the assist, Dipperoo," Bill said, making the drawing vanish with a snap. With a flick of his wrist he set the canyon twirling round and flickering in psychedelic colors - he was particularly fond of the fusion of neon green and bright magenta - and grabbing Dipper by the foot he gave him a push that sent him spinning cartwheels into the depths of the eye razing canyon.

"Try to stick the landing, kid!"

Bill returned to the material plane just as Dipper snapped awake, a scream forcing its way out of his throat. Dipper did not stick the landing, Bill noted with disappointment. He screamed himself right out of his chair and ended up in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Leaving the kid to get himself back together, Bill floated off.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm doing well with writing so what the hell, next chapter.   
> Bill goes to a party and slightly underestimates his resistance to alcohol. Hilarious!  
> He also tries to give alcohol to severely minor minors.

Maps, everywhere. Bill had them spread across the floors of his room and taped up on the walls. Geographical maps, satellite maps, those maps with the funky colors on them - they had to be helpful in some way in finding an underground passage to the Mystery Shack.

Bill had reconstructed the map image he'd seen the night before, and it sat in the middle of it all, a mess of pipe cleaners he'd manipulated into taking the form of the drawing. Those tunnels had to go somewhere, and he eyed the maps critically, looking for some hint.

Eventually he decided he would need more reconnaissance on the ground. Reluctantly he did the human preparing-to-go-out routine (waste of time), cleaning up and getting dressed in clean clothes, and headed downstairs. His stomach was growling, and he needed to fuel the body if he wanted to keep it moving.   
Carter's mother was in the kitchen, preparing a quick lunch during the break between her two jobs. She was a stout woman, somewhat short, with deep brown skin and curly black hair pulled back into a bun. She had an amiable air to her, even Bill could feel it. People liked her. Hell, HE liked her.

"Hey hun, you hungry?" Ms. Williams asked, setting a plate on the table for him. It had a chicken salad sandwich on it; Ms. Williams had made it with the leftover rotisserie chicken they'd had the night before. Bill sat down eagerly, mouth watering. He had to give it to the humans, taste buds were an amazing thing and human food was glorious on his tongue.

Ms. Williams put a glass of juice on the table next to his plate and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

"You going out today too?" She asked, and smiled when he nodded. "That’s good, I'm so happy you're feeling well enough to be out and about again."

Bill wondered how she would take it if he told her that her real son was gone and his body was being worn by an interdimensional demon like a glove. Probably badly. He grinned to himself and got to eating.  
Not long later he was out again, cutting through yards and the half-wild between the houses and the forested area, on his way towards the Mystery Shack. One of the tunnels on the map led in the direction if the heavily forested area behind the house, and he wanted to start his search there. He was feeling cheerfully optimistic as he headed out.

 --

It was a bust. 

After a couple hours of using his demon sight and inspecting oddly shaped rocks and trees and bushes, he'd managed to find a tree stump that wasn't a tree stump. Pulling at it, poking at it, kicking at it did nothing but give off a hollow metallic sound and hurt his foot, but he finally managed to wedge a decently thick branch under one of the roots and pry it open. Underneath had been a metal hatch, with a round handle that he had a hard time cranking open. 

He’d been so excited - this could be it! - but that excitement faded fast once he peered inside the hole beneath the hatch. The tunnel had collapsed at some point in the past thirty years, and dirt and rocks filled the interior. He'd dug at it experimentally, but it was a no go. For a moment he considered using his powers to shove the earth aside, but stopped himself. He hadn't been able to see this tunnel with his demon sight, and after he'd entered it he could feel the magic of the sigils surrounding him. Protective sigils and demon repelling wards were just one of the tricks The Author had - Bill had stumbled onto alarm wards once that The Author had prepared in his room. It stood to reason that he'd place them here as well, and any demonic magic or activity could set them off and betray Bill's presence.

Aggravated and dirty, thirsty and hungry, he left the stupid hole in the ground and wandered back towards society. There were other tunnels on the map, and he'd have to focus on the next one. Physical work was exhausting! This would all be easier if he had the ability to x-Ray vision through all the earth around the Mystery Shack and find the tunnels. With the sigils and wards on them he'd never be able to, though.

Brushing dirt off of himself as best he could, he headed towards the Mystery Shack. He really was hungry, but he was too annoyed to care about physical needs right then. Maybe if he poked around the shack, pretending to be interested in the wares on sale as he investigated, he could find a clue of some sort.

"Hey Carter, what's up?" Wendy greeted him as he entered. She was leaning back against the counter, an open magazine in hand. 

"Nothing much." Bill answered. Wendy raised an eyebrow at that, looking him over.

"Right," she laughed, "Hey, me and Tambry were going to grab something to eat, wanna come?"

"Wendy, I don't think so." Tambry walked up, tapping away at her phone. She spared a look at Bill and gave him what amounted to an apologetic half-smile for her. "No offense, but you look like you were caught in a mudslide. Don't think any place would let you through the door."

"Really?" Bill looked down at himself. Mud caked his shoes and his pants, and his shirt was both dusty and smeared with dirt.

"Oh yeah." Tambry said, focus back on her phone.

"It’s all right, I wasn't really hungry." Bill said, though his stomach thought otherwise.

"Cool," Wendy said, tossing the magazine aside and pushing away from the counter.

"Oh yeah, before I forget," Tambry said as the girls started to head for the door. "So Robbie's parents are gone for a few days, and his band decided to do a show or something in his backyard. They asked me to tell everyone to come, so. You should come, it's tonight."

They were out the door before Bill could respond. He mulled the thought over in his mind -  human activities really shouldn't be trumping his plans for investigating the shack... But then again, he sort of had fun the other night, what with the fire and all. Besides, he told himself, his human body was practically useless after dark. He might as well get out and relax and have fun watching the humans make idiots of themselves.

"Come on Dipper, it'll be fun!" 

Mabel bouncedd out of the door marked "Employees Only", dragging her brother along with her. 

Bill busied himself studying the knick knacks on the counter, fake gold nuggets and jackalope bobble heads. He pretended to inspect a jackalope, poking its head to make it wobble.

"I guess, it's just..." Dipper pulled away from his sister's grasp and fixed his shirt. "I don't know, listening to Robbie's band isn't high on my list of fun things to do."

"It’s not about the band, bro," Mabel spun around, waving her arms excitedly. "It’s about the people, and the partying, and us geTTING INVITED TO A REAL TEENAGER PARTY!"

Mabel's eyes had grown bright and shiny at that point. She grabbed Dipper by his shirt and pulled him close.

"Please go with me? Please please please please please...." 

"All right, I'll go," Dipper laughed finally. 

"Yes!" Mabel exclaimed, pumping her fist in the air. "I'm going to call Grenda and Candy and tell them to get ready for the ultimate summer party!"

She dashed off and left Dipper standing there, rolling his eyes.

And now Bill was all alone with Pine Tree.

He grinned to himself; his tongue itched to say something, maybe ask if the kid had slept well the night before? No, that would be too much. As fun a thought it was, he restrained himself, and instead held out the jackalope bobble head towards Dipper and smiled brightly.

"How much?"

"Uh, I think its twenty bucks." Dipper responded, looking slightly amused.

"What a rip off," Bill frowned, poking the jackalope head. Then he threw Dipper a shrewd look. "I'll give you ten."

Dipper shrugged, "Eh, works for me."

Bill reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of crumpled bills and a few coins.

"Should be enough," He said gleefully, depositing the handful on the counter, and then headed for the door with one last grin in Dipper's direction. The kid looked perplexed and amused, but not suspicious. Bill congratulated himself on his self control and headed home.

 -

 

Parties, Bill decided, were his natural habitat.

In the past couple of hours he had managed to:

  - convince a group of cheerleader girls that the moon landing was a hoax orchestrated by pink aliens from Mars

  - set the lamps scattered outside to give out light of a wavelength invisible to human eyes, but which also boosted the humans' moods to ridiculous levels so that everyone was acting like even wilder party animals than usual

  - make the speakers the band was using randomly start belting out dog bark music in he middle of their songs

  He was feeling quite accomplished.

Even better, Wendy had introduced him to the Mystery Twins as her friend, so now they both treated him amiably and felt comfortable enough sticking around him.

Which was why they were both with him in the kitchen as he demonstrated one of his lesser known skills.

"Now you pour it in, careful you don't wash the salt off the rim, and that's how you make a margarita!" Bill said, pouring the alcoholic mixture into the glass he had prepared with a flourish.

"Wow, it's so pretty!" Mabel exclaimed. Bill had found some cranberry juice in the fridge, and with a wide array of ingredients of alcoholic origins to choose from, had made a bright purple concoction. With a little nudge here or there, of a decidedly non-material-world kind, he'd made the drink sparkle like a liquid gem. Mabel was no doubt entranced because he'd managed to make it the same shade as her sparkly purple sweater (this one featuring a unicorn in a party hat with the words 'Party Animal' underneath).

"Wanna try it?" He asked. For a second both kids looked eager.

"No, I don't think we should be drinking." Dipper said after a moment, shaking his head. Mabel nodded solemnly in agreement.

"Come on, it's a party. What's the point if you don't loosen up and have fun?" Bill laughed, nudging Dipper in the arm. Dipper gave a nervous laugh, looking undecided, while Mabel looked extremely pensive. Her face brightened suddenly, and she snatched the glass off the table.

"I'm going to show this to Grenda and Candy before someone gets to it!" She said cheerfully, spinning around.

"Mabel, do you really want to do that?" Dipper called after her, worried. She laughed, shooting him a bright smile.

"Don’t be silly, Dipper, it's not like we're going to drink it," she said, rolling her eyes, "I just want to show it to them."

She disappeared in a flash of sparkling threads.

"What about you, Dipper?" Bill asked.

"I'll stick with soda, thanks," Dipper said with a nervous chuckle. He really didn't seem much into the party. Well, that wouldn't do. Bill reached over to grab the kid a soda, and as he handed it over he moved some atoms around discretely. The kid wouldn't know what hit him, Bill thought with a chuckle, but he deserved to have some fun. Once Bill's plan came to fruition, fun would be the last thing on Pine Tree's mind.

"Come on," Bill said after Dipper had taken a few sips. "Lets see what sort of excitement we can scrounge up around here."

"Yeah," Dipper said with a laugh; his face was getting some color and he looked a little bubblier. "Yeah, let's do it."

So Bill grabbed another bottle of beer and off they went.

Bill had taken a quick look around when he'd first arrived, glancing straight through walls and doors, and now he led Dipper to the garage, opening the door and letting the kid enter before him.

"What are we doing in the garage?" Dipper asked as Bill flipped the light switch, sounding a bit disappointed.

"You'll see," Bill said with a secretive grin. There was a shelving unit along one wall, and Bill trotted over to it. Humming a cheerful tune, he began looking through the boxes arranged on the shelves, and a moment later Dipper joined him.

"What're we looking for?" Dipper asked, setting down his can with a clunk. Bill noted that it sounded empty and grinned.

"Ah ah ah, Dippity-do-da, that'd ruin the surprise." He said with an only slightly wild chuckle. Dipper gave him a horrified look.

"Don't ever call me that again, especially in public," the kid said. "Ever."

Bill laughed and continued scouring the boxes until he found what he was looking for.

"Aha!" He held the box up triumphantly.

"What? What is it?" Dipper asked, bouncing up to his feet from where had been sitting next to a box of books.

With a sly grin Bill lowers the box so Dipper could look inside.

"No way," Dipper breathed, eyes wide.

The entire box was filled, brim to brim, with fireworks of all sizes and shapes. Bottle rockets and Roman candles mixed in among standard firecrackers and cherry bombs. There may even have been a few larger sky rockets at the bottom.

"Whaddya say we take this party to the next level?" Bill asked slyly. Dipper looked back at him with a bright smile, and with a whoop they headed outside 

- 

Two hours, and a sky full of exploding colored gunpowder later, Bill was finishing off a 24 pack of beer by himself and Dipper was regaling some tween-aged girls with heroic stories that absolutely did not happen (and were absolutely based on his dreams), but which captivated them all the same. Bill rolled his eyes as the girls squealed and Dipper beamed. Outgoing Dipper was ridiculous; Bill preferred him as a nervous wreck, but at least the kid was having fun. 

Leaving Dipper to his adoring fans so the kid could enjoy himself while he was still unaware of what he was doing, Bill headed back towards the kitchen, empty bottle in hand. His feet, for some reason, were not functioning properly and his eyes were making things hazy. It led to a lot of stumbling and bumping into things.  
Was he drunk? Was this him, enveloped in drunkenness? He considered that for a moment, then laughed.  
Of course not! He was a demon, and demons didn't get drunk. His human body might get drunk, Bill admitted, but he wasn't his body, he was his demon self. Alcohol affected him in no way whatsoever, his mind was still sharp as a... a... sharp pointy stick thing. So Sharp. Sharpity-sharp.He giggled to himself as he rounded the corner and ran SMACK into Robbie.

"Woah haha," Bill patted Robbie on the shoulder. "Sorry."

"Its all right," Robbie replied, a grin appearing on his face. For a moment they stood there awkwardly, then Robbie added, "I didn't... I didn't think you'd come."

Bill noted they were standing close to each other, and he had his hand on Robbie's shoulder, but he also noted that with his hand on Robbie's shoulder his feet didn't seem so wobbly. Hmmm...

"Yeah, I..." Bill waved his other hand In the air languidly, "thought I should get out, learn to live again or something, you know?" 

He grinned crookedly.

"Yeah, I get you," Robbie said. He looked like he was after a few beers himself, Bill noticed, his eyes sort of glazed and his face sort of flushed. 

"Like, life's shit so... It like takes a while to get used to living with it again?" Robbie continued. He spoke with his hands, Bill noticed, and one of them brushed against Bill's side as he spoke. For a second there was an oddest sensation that warmed Bill's body, but then it was gone.

He didn't pay it much attention, until Robbie's hand brushed his side again, and stayed there this time.

"So, you feeling a bit better now?" Robbie asked. Bill wasn't sure how to feel about the way the kid was looking at him so intently, a stupid half-grin on his face, except that he supposed he didn't mind it. 

"Yeah I guess," Bill giggled. He felt bubbly like champagne inside, and Robbie's hand on his side was sending these warm feeling shuddery sensations through him. Body shuddery warmness. 

"Your band," Bill blurted out suddenly, "it was nice. Good. You know, musical."

"Yeah?" Robbie seemed pleased. Somehow the two of them had leaned even closer during their talk, and Bill could feel his breath on his face. "Like, the musical thing is sorta what we're going for."

"Cuz you're a band." Bill supplied helpfully. He'd taken his hand off of Robbie's shoulder, but with their tight quarters he'd had no choice but to trail it down his arm. The material of Robbie's hoodie was soft, it felt nice under Bill's fingers. 

"Yeah," Robbie sort of breathed the word instead of said it. His hand found Bill's as he continued,

Hey, you wanna go upstairs? I got a song I'm working on, maybe you can like, help me out?"

Bill squinted up at the ceiling, then looked back at Robbie.

"Like what, with music? Bill laughed, "You gonna serenade me with your guitar?"

Hilarious! Bill thought. He'd twined his fingers with Robbie's at some point and that odd warm shuddery sensation was flooding him and making him giddy. His heart was pounding a bit more than usual and it was like adrenaline or endorphins or something was flooding him. His body. THE body. That he was in. He giggled again.

"Yeah," Robbie said, "I'll give you a private show, huh?"

"Okay," Bill said.

What the hell, he thought as he followed the kid, what a PARTY.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bill calls humans a lot of mean words in this one. What a meanie.

Humans were disgusting. Filthy. Revolting creatures. Vile and...and repulsive...and...

Bill kept the litany up in his head because it was the only way he could keep down the rising feeling of bliss and contentment that was threatening to overwhelm him. 

He was disgusted in humans, it was their fault not his! Their stupid proclivity for hormone driven procreation! Or non-procreation in this case. Recreational procreational pantomime.

How was he supposed to know it could overpower the senses like that, reduce the will and remove the inhibition?!

He was not happy. Not at all. He was so very unhappy, and the only reason he hadn't leveled the house, and everyone in it, was because he was so very unhappy he couldn't focus his energies properly.  
So he lay, angrily albeit entirely comfortably, on his back on Robbie's bed and glared up at the ceiling. It was black, like the walls were black. Like the sheets were black. Everything was black. It was disgusting.

Bill grumbled and looked out the corner of his eye at the revolting human who lay next to him, already asleep and snoring in a not at all adorable way.

Bill resisted the urge to punch Robbie's face in and told himself, sternly, that he was going to get up and leave. Easier said than done, his body had a strange sort of sleepy contentment going on that made it difficult for him to get it moving. Besides, Robbie still had an arm around him, laying gently across the mostly-healed scar on his abdomen. The putrid fleshbag had been considerate enough to ask Bill about it, if it'd be okay, he didn't want him to hurt himself.

_No_ , Bill had said, _it'd be fine. It was fine_. 

It was because he didn't know, Bill told himself despite all evidence in his mind and memories to the contrary; he'd write his OWN history of events, truth be damned!

With massive effort he managed to detach himself from what his body thought was a perfectly comfortable arrangement and pushed Robbie away from himself. Grumbling some more, he climbed out of the bed and started searching for his clothes in the dim half-light that made it through the cracks of the door. 

"Hey..." 

Bill looked back at the sound of the voice to see Robbie sitting up on the bed, looking sleepy and confused.

"You okay?" He asked. Bill snorted as he pulled on his boxers, then his pants.

"Disgusting," Bill spat, grabbing his shirt from the floor, and then glared at Robbie. "You’re filthy."

Shock joined the look of confusion on the kid's face, chasing away any hint of drowsiness.

"W-what?" Robbie stammered, "Dude, I'm sorry..."

Bill was still incensed, still roiling with rage. He pulled the shirt on viciously as he thought of a response that would adequately cut the kid down. He was a dream demon, he knew the unspoken fears of anyone who dreamed, and what we're his fears again, what rattled in that empty brain of his in the dead of night? And it came to him, and when he spoke next it was in a low voice dripping with venom,

"Save it for your girlfriend."

The reaction was beautiful; Robbie shrank away from him as if he'd threatened him with a beating, backed up against the wall and seemed to close up on himself, his eyes widening. He practically reeked of turmoil, Bill could smell it in the air, worry and doubt and guilt. Guilt. That delicious scent. It was almost as good as fear or pain.

With a last daggered look, Bill stalked out of the room and down the stairs. The party was still in motion, but most of the partygoers seemed to have left for home already. Bill could not care less about that now. He left the house and walked with measured purposeful steps towards his house - Carter's house. His emotions boiled inside him, anger and disgust and a deep self-hate for losing control of himself. He wanted to vomit.

Instead, he cut into the woods as soon as he could. Once a dozen yards in he released the pent up energy inside of him. Tree trucks snapped, bark splitting and splintering. The ground beneath his feet cracked with each step. Bill growled, and a nearby bush burst into flames, flickering blue and purple and sickly green. He shouldn't be releasing that much energy in one place, he knew. If The Author still had any of his toys around, they'd pick up the energy readings in moments, and he was not ready for his location, and the truth of his plan, to be revealed just yet.

So he reigned himself in - dousing the fire that was threatening to set the trees around it alight, and strode through the forest. His anger remained, unassuaged by his moment of release; a rabbit had the unfortunate luck of crossing his path, and before it took two bounds he'd focused on it, set its body quivering until it released a high pitched shriek of pain. Quivering and shuddering until the force of it caused its furry little body to explode in a mess of blood and guts. That made him feel a little better, and he kicked the creature's detached head viciously when he reached it, watching it speed across the ground and crack into a tree.  
The woodland creatures must've taken note that something destructive was in their midst, and nothing more crossed his path the rest of the way to the house.

Once inside he headed straight for the bathroom, where he stripped off his clothes stepped into the shower, and scrubbed himself raw, releasing most of the rest of his pent up anger. His bad mood faded, but his disappointment in himself did not. 

Standing in front of the mirror, he eyed himself in its surface coldly, glaring at his traitorous body. Not his! THE body, Carter's body. His - Carter's - dark skin glistened wryly in the bathroom light. His abdominal scar peered at him, laughed at him. His dark eyes regarded himself with no lack of disgust. 

This body - this traitorous body! Bill grew livid again, stalked close to the mirror and glared at the reflection.

"You," He said firmly, stabbing at the reflection with a finger, " Are mine! YOU work for ME!"

And not the other way around, he added silently.

He left the bathroom and went to bed, tossing the body down with little care. He wanted out of it; he wanted to feel himself again. He pulled out of the body, but it was difficult, he felt stretched like taffy, as if part of him was stuck inside the body somewhere. 

Should that worry him? Maybe, but he'd leave that for later. He had become too engrossed in the human business, he'd gone too far to emulate them, and he'd dropped his guard and opened himself to human influences. Disgusting. Just thinking about what happened made him feel... hot, oddly enough. And disgusted, of course. So disgusted. His inner being trembled a bit in a way that was much too close to pleasurable longing for comfort; he pushed that feeling away and focused on his anger instead.

He needed to feel his power again, Bill decided. Find some dreams to manipulate, flex his multiversal muscles again. 

So he trans-versed planes to the Mystery Shack, and careful to avoid the dreams of the older men, looked to see if the twins were home - he didn't know what time it was, they could still have been in the party.

They were both home, however, and eagerly he pounced into his second favorite dreamer's dreams.

Candy floss clouds and rosy skies, that's what Mabel's dreams were made of. It was absolutely revolting and stunning at the same time. Mabel was a creative soul, much like him, and it showed in her dreams. Crystal ponies and candy cane piglets roamed the good kingdom of Mableland. Most often, once you got past the candy shell, Mabel's dreams got more realistic, with her newest hot crush wooing her in various super romantic ways. Bill had always thought it was hilarious and pitiful, humans vying for each other's attention, begging to be noticed, despairing when they weren't. 

Maybe, Bill thought, if he was lucky, he'd get a nice dream date dream to drive to catastrophe. The thought made him giddy, and he floated cheerfully through the candy clouds towards the depths of Mabel's dreams.

Then he stopped.

His eye narrowed, he shot a look around. Nothing had changed in the dreamscape, and he could see Mabel's active dream not far in the distance, a scene playing out in a mall.

He attempted to float forward again, and again he was stopped. No force field, no pressure against him, just a stop, as if the plane he was on ended at that exact spot, and there was nowhere further to go.  
The yellow of his bricks began to tint red as realization struck him - The Author! It had to be him, the twins could never have figured out the intricacies necessary to implement a dream guard like this! His rage boiled over, his bricks turned blood red laced through with orange magma. Around him Candy floss clouds melted into a sticky mess, grass burned into black ash.

Now that he had an idea of what was going on, he could see it. At the edges of his vision twinkled sigils, bright colored and so, so far away. When he turned to look at them head on, they vanish from his view. They weren't in the dreamscape; he would have felt them if they were. They must have been worn, or carried, a necklace or talisman.

Mulling this over, Bill switched his paths, rocketed across planes and into Dipper's dreams. He paid little attention to what was going on, instead focused on entering the depths of the kid's dreams. Again, he was stopped, and again those sigils twinkled like distant stars on the horizon if his vision.

He razed a hole in the periphery of Dipper's dreams with his anger.

This would not do.

He needed a plan, he decided as he floated back into the upper ethers of his native plane. There, at least, he was surrounded by the familiar, and it eased his rage somewhat.

A plan, he thought. Time to recoup, to focus again on his goal.

He needed to get into the Mystery Shack.

 

A tunnel led towards the town on the armature map, a tunnel he wanted to know more about. On an excursion that involved causing a grease fire in the diner's kitchen (chaos!) Bill was able to find what he was looking for in the diner's back closet, behind the shelving unit. There was a small two foot by two foot door that led into a low tunnel. 

After breaking into the diner late at night, Bill sat and inspected the tunnel intently. His demon sight allowed him to see in a sort of night vision, so he could make out the walls and ceiling of the tunnel. He'd have to crawl, he realized. With an aggravated snort, he got down on his hands and knees and entered the tunnel.   
The ground was rough, and pebbles stuck into his palms and arms as he made his way. A few times he forgot himself, and trying to see better, banged his head on the top of the tunnel. 

The air was dank and old, and each breath brought a mouthful of dust with it, so he was coughing as much as not. Human bodies, weak.

The tunnel ran surprisingly straight for a long distance, but Bill knew it had to turn at some point. The Mystery Shack was in the other direction, after all. He thought about that as he scraped his way through the tunnel, but just as he was starting to doubt that this was a tunnel he wanted, it began to gently curve towards the direction of the Mystery Shack. 

Bill sped up eagerly; the shack was still far away, but he supposed that the tunnel should widen at some point. And widen it did. Suddenly he found nothing but inky blackness before him, even using his demon sight. Curious by this drastic change, he leaned out over the ledge of the tunnel and held a hand out into the darkness.

With a flick of his wrist he conjured a tiny blue flame, and in its light saw that there were a series of steps cut into the ground, leading down from the tunnel. Easing himself out, he scurried down the steps, holding the flame high. The darkness around him swallowed it's little light, and he could barely see five feet ahead or behind or side to side. Added to that, the whole place felt magic-heavy. Somewhere around him, in the ground and stones, were multiple sigils. By tracking them with his mind, hw developed a mental map of the cavern in his head, and it WAS a cavern. Thirty feet deep by thirty wide, and about sixty feet long.   
And it was utterly empty.

And there were no doorways or tunnels branching off of it. 

Bill huffed, and sent out his senses again. He was missing something - sigils there were aplenty, but he couldn't detect a ward. 

He knew there was at least one - the tunnel was invisible to his demon sight if he wasn't inside it. But where?

Determined to discover the answer, he took to walking along the edge of the wall, scouring the surface for clues. It took a long time, but he was methodical and unhurried, and eventually his persistence paid off.  
A ward, hidden within a mass of sigils that masked it. Bill grinned to himself; it was a simple ward, and only one! He could crack it in his sleep.

Laughing, he drew the appropriate sign on the soil wall, and watched as the ward symbol flared into view. It glistened a bright red, then vanished, and Bill heard a slight rumbling behind the wall of dirt. The wall cracked open suddenly, the two halves receding to the sides in a spray of dirt.

Stale air rusted out, choking Bill for a moment, but he coughed and sent his senses out into the tunnel beyond.

Sigils, and some wards of the demon sight nullifying kind, and a line directly to the shack.

It was beautiful, Bill thought. He stepped foot into the tunnel eagerly, and it was then that he noticed that the rumbling from the wall hadn't stopped. If anything, it had grown in intensity. He paused, looking around himself as he tried to pinpoint the sound.

It was impossible - it was coming from everywhere at once! The walls of the cavern he was in were shaking, and glancing at the span nearest him he saw holes, large holes, opening up near the bottom. Was something going to come out of them? He couldn't imagine what.

The answer was, no, nothing was going to come out of them. It was going to come out of the tunnel he was about to walk into.

Bill turned back as the rumbling grew louder and the floor began to dance beneath his feet, just in time to catch a faceful of water.

Not passive water - rushing water, fast and furious and pounding. He was thrown back like a rag doll by the force of it, the tiny flame extinguishing in his hand. For a moment he was actually able to stand up again and make a dash for the stairs, using his power to build levees around him to keep the water at bay.  
The water was adamant, and levees of soil could not stop it. He barely got a finger on a stair before he was swept away by the rapidly rising water. He wondered if it would fill the cavern, if he would have to swim and risk drowning.

Drowning! He was even starting to think like a human. He concentrated, and a bubble of air came into being between him and the water, the oxygen atoms being separated by his sheer force of will from their bonded hydrogen.

With purpose, he swam towards the tunnel he had come from. No longer bothering with discretion, he forced it larger as he went, making it easier to swim up the tunnel, if muddier. The water pushed him along, helping him move faster than he could have alone.

Eventually he noticed the water was not rushing so much, rather it was growing still, and a short while later he felt air at the top of his head. Splashing forward, he pulled himself into an area of the tunnel where the water was only a few inches deep. Whatever reservoir it had been held in must have run empty, and the tunnel itself must have sloped, at such a slight angle that Bill hadn't noticed.

He got back to making his way to the entrance. It seemed to be a longer road than he remembered, but his body had been through a lot, and he could feel how weary the muscles were. Almost painfully, he dragged himself the last few feet up the tunnel and out the door. 

Splayed against the cool floor, he glanced around. The diner was still dark. Good. He pulled himself to his feet, then closed the small door and heaved the shelf back in place. 

He wondered, as he worked, if his adventure in the tunnel had set off any alarms. He hadn't felt any wards being set off, but he also was busy keeping his body from drowning. 

He'd find out soon enough. Wearily, he headed out of the diner and back to the house.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came so close to becoming a badly written YA gay romance fanfiction I almost threw up a little.  
> Then Bill remembered he was demon. Good for you Bill!
> 
> Remember, if you ever want to bug me : http://itsdetachable.tumblr.com is the place to go

Bill was surrounded by maps again. Before him the armature replica of the Mystery Shack map hung in the air, twirling softly. He hummed a tune to himself, a two note melody that he'd heard once in the planes between planes. Humans weren't meant to mimic those sounds, however, and his humming was off tone.

Mentally he attempted to check off the tunnels that might have been the ones he'd inspected. There were still a few more, though one had grabbed his interest from the beginning. He'd avoided it initially because the chance of him being discovered would be high, by now he was determined I find a way in. He pulled the armature closer I himself, eyeing the tunnel. It led directly to the portal chamber, and there was a chance it would be blocked off by now, considering the importance of the room, but if it wasn't...

He tapped his fingers impatiently on his knee and looked down at the maps arranged on the floor around him. Where could the opening to that tunnel be? Where would The Author place it?

Somewhere few people went, no doubt. Bill had surmised the tunnel from the diner was the one that connected to the shack's kitchen - it made sense. The tunnel in the forest had been close by, and no doubt was the one connected to the living room wall. Those were not important passages, but this one...

Bill exhaled, focused. The maps around him shifted and repositioned until they hung in layers below the armature, town map at the top followed by several geological survey maps. A trail of glittering light stretched out of the tunnel to the portal, and as he thought intently the maps shifted slightly. The glittering line led towards a sparsely populated part of town. He frowned, setting most of the maps down and grabbing hold of the town map.

The graveyard. Bill smirked. Of course! Humans and their stupid little superstitions. He set the armature back on the desk in his room, and with a flick of his wrist set the maps scurrying over the floor to form a pile next to the desk. He rose from the floor, and grimaced as unused muscles ached - he'd had his stupid body sitting too long and the circulation to his legs had been stemmed. Now he had the utterly ridiculous feeling of ants marching up and down his skin. He grimaced, stretched, and yawned. Magic use had been tiring him out more than usual lately. He wondered if he was overstaying his bodily welcome, if his demonic presence was too overwhelming for his vessel.

Glancing at the window, he saw that the sun was already setting. He'd wasted a day without realizing it. Tired, he considered his options, then shook his head. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he'd scour the graveyard, but until then...

He collapsed on the bed and resigned his body to sleep.

 

-

Bill didn't dream. Dreams were for mortals. Bill controlled dreams, he tampered with dreams, he rattled them like dice in a Yahtzee cup.

It must've been memories then, this feeling of hot and good and yes! Memories of the lips and the tongue and the touching, only memories, and he could deal with memories too. He could lock them away or bring them back, light them up or turn them around or destroy them if he wanted to.

He could destroy this if he wanted to.

Destroy the remembering of the feeling when two bodies meet, the heat of breath on skin, the friction and the burn and that explosive endorphinous rush that suffused from head to toes and beyond.

He could just destroy it all.

-

 

Bill left the house before the sun had fully risen, stepping quietly to keep from waking Ms. Williams. The town was at a near hush at that time of the early morning, a near hush that made his fingers itch - he didn't like that kind of quiet, it meant calm, it meant peacefulness. Neither of those concepts sat well with him.

The graveyard was located off to the side of Gravity Hills proper, the newer section laying closer to the town while the rest of it stretched, progressively older, up the side of a hill. Bill walked past the newer graves, gravemarkers still visible among the well kept grass. As he climbed the hill, the gravemarkers got older, their style changed, and the grass around them became wilder, choked with clover and other low lying weeds.

Bill walked with determined purpose between the graves, taking a straight line towards the oldest ones. There was no use going back thirty-forty-fifty years, those graves were too small, too inelegant, to make a properly hidden entrance, he thought. So he angled towards the older graves, not the settler graves which had long since lost their names to history, but the ones that came after, once Gravity Falls had become a bit wealthier. These were the mini mausoleums, the family tombs, with their sarcophagi and their wrought iron doors. He walked past the intricate and well kept moderately sized tomb of the Northwest family, beyond it to where the the smaller mausoleums stood.

A dark figure hovered at the entrance of one of them, and Bill's eyes narrowed as he recognized who it was. He didn't change his direction, however, and headed directly down the path. Robbie turned away from eyeing the words carved above the doorway to look at him with surprise, obviously not expecting anyone else to be there.

"Uh, hey," he said. 

Bill ignored him, passing by and inspecting the mausoleums as he walked. There were quite a few that looked old, overgrown with weeds and vines. He circled one, then another, discovering as he did so that other graves had been dug in the spaces between them. Some of the gravestones still stood, though their writing had long since been degraded by rain and wind.  
Bill realized he was being watched. He looked over his shoulder to find that Robbie was still there, watching him curiously.

"You looking for something?" Robbie asked. Bill ignored him again, turned back to his task. He'd found a tomb that looked promising; he could feel a faint hint of magic around in, like a residual dusting. Possibly nothing - there were quite a few former residents that had known how to utilize magic, but it was worth a look. 

He headed around to the front of it and eyed the wrought iron gating in front of the door. It looked sturdy, despite the passage of years upon years. He grabbed it, rattled it to get a feel for how it sat. The gating was rickety, but it held. He took hold of the lock in the gate, attempting to push on it in some way to break it free.

"Need some help?"

Bill gritted his teeth; help was not what he needed. What he needed was a certain human to leave the vicinity so he could use a bit of his magic to make this all go smoother.  
For a moment he entertained the thought of getting rid of Robbie, in an absolutely fun way like stripping his skin or imploding his insides like he'd done with the rabbit. He sighed; he couldn't, people knew the kid, would notice he was gone. 

Bill focused back on the gate, noticed there was a loose bar towards the bottom. With a kick, he broke it off of the gate, and after grabbing up the piece he posed it between the bars of the two sections and worked at wrenching it open.

The lock was old, after all, and where his flimsy human arms couldn't do the job, the added pressure of the bar did. With a screech and a groan, the lock mechanism twisted apart, and the two halves of the gate swung free.

Bill shoved them open and stepped up to the door of the tomb. It was made of wood, and though preserved well he could see even without his demon sight that the lock was loosened and rusty. He gave the door a hard shove, and it gave way.

The tomb greeted him with a burst of stale and dusty air. The morning sun peered in through grimy windows set near the top of the walls, thin beams spreading to light the interior. Bill stepped inside, taking a quick look at the interior.

It was about six feet wide by ten feet deep. On the far wall a ledge ran across the width of the room, on which stood urns of stone and metal In varying styles. There was a single stone sarcophagus at dead center, with surprisingly well preserved dried flowers on the lid. Slowly, Bill walked across the floor, directing his demon sight through the blocks below his feet. 

"You think there's actually ashes in this thing?"

Bill halted, glared at Robbie where the kid stood near the back of the tomb, metal urn in hand. 

"If there aren't any, we can always put yours in there," Bill said coldly. Robbie made an amused sound.

Bill continued inspecting the tomb, but it soon became apparent this wasn't what he was looking for. He headed back outside and  took another look around. Where did The Author put it? He walked on along the old path between tombs, glancing at them as he passed. After a few moments he realized that the sound of footsteps was following him. He stopped and took a deep breath, then turned around. Robbie stood a few feet behind him, attempting to look nonchalant.

"Don't follow me." Bill spat.

"Tch, who said I was," Robbie responded.

Bill glared at him and whipped back around, stalking down the row, deciding to ignore his wannabe stalker.  He stepped up to another tomb, began looking it over. He felt rather than saw Robbie step up closer to him as he stood there. 

"Look, like, I'm sorry?" Robbie said. "I didn't know it'd piss you off so much, but, maybe we could talk about it?"

Cold anger. Bill breathed exhaled slowly through his nose. He wanted to talk about it?! Bill tried to reason that this was a human with an idiotic human brain and he shouldn't be getting mad but he still turned around and gave Robbie a vicious shove.

The kid fell back with a yelp, crashing into a nearby headstone, and the ground gave a shudder that even Bill could feel under his feet. Suddenly the ground dropped beneath him, and he was tumbling down into deep pit, landing at the bottom with a surprisingly soft crash. 

"Ow," Whimpered a voice beneath him. Pushing himself up, Bill realized that he had landed on top of Robbie, who seemed to have absorbed most of the fall. Grimacing, Bill made to move off of him, but what he thought was solid ground beneath one hand was instead a layer of multiple rounded somethings that shifted and rolled as he put pressure on them. His hand slipped and he faceplanted onto Robbie again. As if that wasn't bad enough, the kid had the audacity to let out a pained yet amused chuckle.

Pushing himself up onto his elbows, carefully this time, he resolved to hunt down the demons that plucked the strands of fate and burn them all, one by one. 

They were much too close, physically, for Bill's liking. He blamed Robbie for feeling so awkward, for the feelings their close proximity to each other brought up in him. Their positions were too similar to the other night, their bodies on each other, their warmth intermingling.   
Bill's body felt hungry, only it wasn't his body but him, and he wasn't hungry but starving, and human existence was a horrid affair, and he leaned forward and smashed his lips against Robbie's.

Robbie let out a surprised noise, but he didn't retreat. His hands found Bill's sides, pulling him closer, and Bill moaned, rocked his hips.

The memories were delicious and inviting, and the reality was dangerously enticing. Bill found himself wondering if it would feel the same the second time around, down in a graveyard pit covered in crypt dust. 

Would it feel better?

It was illogical that he feel that way. Demonic lust was a of a purely non-corporeal nature, existing outside the realms of physicality, but somehow human hormonal drives had poisoned it, twisted it, and it burned through his being and his body.

It was a challenge to pull away, to break the connection, but he did it. Breathing hard, Bill struggled to regain control, glaring at Robbie until he realized that wasn't helping. He shot a look around the pit they had fallen into instead, not actually taking much in, just desperate to see something, anything, to take his mind off of the disgusting thoughts in his head. 

The pit they were in had actually been a grave at some point, he noted. They lay in a pile of multiple humans bones. Interesting. He definitely liked the aesthetic in that.

"You're really confusing me." Robbie said after a long moment.

"Shut up!" Bill growled, glaring daggers. Robbie shrank back slightly, holding his hands up on surrender. 

Bill continued to glare at him, reconsidering his earlier thoughts of sparing the kid's life.

hey were underground, he could do away with the body easily. The thought was a good one, an enticing one, enticing enough to clear his mind of other thoughts. He gripped the front of Robbie's hoodie tightly, twisting the fabric in his hands.

Something glimmered. Bill blinked, looked down. There, on Robbie's hoodie, the symbol on the front was giving off light. Bill loosed his gripped on the hoodie, and the fabric straightened. The symbol came into better view, the light growing - it was a stylistic heart, with black stitching across it. 

Why? Bill thought.

And then HE KNEW.

His being transcended multiples of multiple multiverses. His vision went into 360 degrees and more, he could see all!

Around him his circle spun into view, glittering like gold. A symbol stood out in sharp relief, stylized heart with stitches, the same one as on Robbie's hoodie.

Bill laughed across planes!

This! And now? That symbol was everywhere, the entire area was inundated with clothes covered in it!

But Bill didn't doubt. Within his vision probabilities appeared, doorways flung open, pathways connecting to those he'd already uncovered, growing like tree branches to lead to new horizons.

But why only now, Bill wondered. Now?!

It didn't matter, he'd think on it later, the possibilities of "why now" crept in at the edges of his mind but he shooed them away.

He had so much more to work with now, he crowed with glee. The summoning circle spun round him, and the pathways glittered. So much of his plan could be grown with information of those paths, so much of it could be expanded on.

"You okay man?" 

Bill faltered, fluttered, fell back to the body. He huffed, aggravated, and looked down at Robbie coldly. He was giving Bill a wary and concerned look. 

Bill found he was no longer as incensed as before, but the elation of opening those new doors fell as he regarded Robbie.

He would have to keep the kid alive, at least for now. He heaved a disappointed sigh at the injustice of the multiverse, then rocked back and pushed himself onto his feet.

"You," he growled, grabbing Robbie by the front of his hoodie and getting him up. "Are never going to get near me again."

With strength that must've seemed unreal to the human, he swung around and flung him towards whatever was behind him, just for the hell of it.

It was a ramp, Bill noted as Robbie hit it with a loud thump, a ramp that they had inadvertently dropped and tumbled down. That was good to know.

Robbie scrabbled to his feet, shooting Bill a frightened glance. Bill narrowed his eyes, and the kid yelped.

"I'm going!" Robbie whimpered and scurried up the ramp. Bill watched him go, pleased to see he was suitably terrified. That would work for now - as long as the kid stayed away from him he wouldn't have to deal with those stupid parasitic human feelings, at least not until he learned to control them.

He turned back to his inspection of the pit, thoroughly taking in his surroundings now that he was alone. 

The area he stood in was wider than he'd initially thought, at least ten to twelve feet wide and around eight feet deep. As he stood facing the ramp, the bones lay beneath his feet. He'd heard of humans reusing grave plots but this was the first time he'd seen it first-hand. In the wall of dirt to his left he could see the rotted wooden supports that had held the ramp up. Curiously, the grave had never been part of the design, he could clearly see that the ramp ended before reaching it. Soil erosion, possibly, or time eroded sigils, or both. 

To his right, Bill saw that the pit rapidly narrowed and lost height, turning into a low tunnel. He followed it for a few yards as it twisted and turned, until it finally stopped abruptly at a wall of soil. 

Eyeing it thoughtfully, Bill looked for anything that might have seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing did. Other than the fact that the soil wall was oddly flat and straight, he could not see anything odd about it. No magical residue twinkled from its surface, no wards or sigils flickered in his sight. Even switching to his demon sight, looking straight through, all he saw was more dirt.

Every human magic, no matter how expertly crafted, was detectable, you just had to know how to trip it, without actually tripping it.

Not his words, and Bill had never bothered to learn the name of the demon who'd said them (they'd stopped existing after that meeting, so what was the point?), but it was good advice.

Bill leaned forward, so close the tip of his nose almost touched the wall. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the earthy smell, and held the breath in for a long moment. Then he exhaled slowly onto the dirt wall.

Slowly, almost painfully so, something within the wall began to make itself know. He watched with bated breath as the surface shifted slightly, as a bluish-purple flickering began to spot the wall in front of him. As he watched, the flickering turned to spots that glowed, and the spots began connecting into lines, and the lines formed an intricate tapestry of sigils and wards, overlapping and connect in, across the entire expanse of the wall.

Human magic was crude, but at that moment it was the most beautiful sight he'd seen in a long time. An exultant rush filled him, if he grinned any wider his face would split, but maybe he should let it because containing the feeling of elation was almost too difficult. 

He'd found it, and it was all he'd been hoping for. The lines in the wall were fading, but it didn't matter. He'd seen enough. The sigils were there, the wards were there. There were alarms, too, but the tiny amount of demon magic he'd infused in his breath hadn't tripped them. More than that, they were fresh, new, recently placed. The ramp had been untouched, which meant that they were placed from the other side, which meant that the tunnel was open, or had been open until recently. 

No, it had to be open. The only other option was to collapse it, which would have caused too much trouble. No, the tunnel was open.

Bill basked in the glow of near triumph. The Author was smart, but not smart enough, and the crafty bastard was never going to see this coming.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm of the opinion that while Bill finds the methods of demonic magic easier and cleaner, he prefers the methods of certain types of human magic, as they are more fulfilling. And fun. So much fun!
> 
> Don't forget, you can bug me and follow for uppdates on this (and the coming continuation!) At itsdetachable.tumblr.com

Alarm wards created with human magic needed to be broken with human magic to keep them silent. A hint of demon magic too much and they would set off, and ruin everything.  
It took Bill most of the day to hunt down what he needed. He had to make do with what was nearby - rabbits and foxes and deer and crows and blackbirds. One of each was enough, maybe more than enough, but he needed to be sure. He hadn't worked human magic in a human body in a very, very long time - he wanted to be prepared.

Five animals, five points to a star. He had dispatched them with broken necks, and they lay around him in the tunnel next to the wall of dirt. Humming his multiversal tune, no longer caring that it was off tone, he dug into the soil deep enough to set a five gallon tub in it, level with the ground. First he pulled over the deer, a two year old buck, and positioned its neck over the tub. At his side was a silver knife he'd swiped from an antique store. He'd carefully wrapped the hilt in layers of fabric, but it still stung his palm when he lifted it. He didn't care.

With a gleeful smile he pulled it across the dead deer's neck in one smooth motion. The edge sliced neatly through skin and muscle and trachea, and a stream of crimson spurted out. There was no heart pumping, however, so he had to get to his feet and lift the animal, holding it over the tub as gravity worked to pull the blood out. It wasn't quantity that mattered really, but the source.

Tossing aside the deer, he pulled the fox over next. It was a curiously colored fox, overall a rust red, but with darker brown and black coloring across the shoulders and down the spine. He admired it, running bloodied fingers through the soft fur. He liked foxes, cunning and sly and mischievous.

Positioning it over the tub, he cut the throat, and again held the animal upside down for the blood to flow into the tub.

He took the rabbit next, a gentle brown yearling he'd caught near the lake. There wasn't a lot of blood that could be coaxed out of its body by gravity - he had to resort to squeezing the carcass like a wet towel, wringing it from feet to shoulders to get as much of the blood out as he could. He tossed that mangled carcass on the others and moved on to the birds.

There would be little blood he could get out, so he had to resort to cutting their little bitty hearts out. First, he spread their wings and held them down with stones, and then with the silver knife he cut away feathers from their breasts. They were delicate creatures requiring a delicate hand, and his actions were slow and careful as he gently cut into their rib cages on the right side. Once he'd loosened then enough, he yanked them over to left and extracted the heart. With the silver knife he made a series of incisions so that the hearts' blood and fluids would mix with the blood in the tub more readily, and tossed the hearts in.

Throwing the knife aside, he moved the carcasses back into the pit beneath the ramp to give himself room to work. The sky was still bright, but the sun was on its downward path and the light streaming into the pit had taken on an orange tint. The process was taking long, but he was nearing the end now.

Returning to the tub, he put his hands into the blood and began mixing it. There wasn't a lot to work with, but it would be enough. Under his breath he muttered Latin words, human language for human magic, infusing the blood with energy. Once that was done, he gathered some of the blood in his hands and stood.

The circle was first, wide around with the tub in the middle. Blood dribbled from between his fingers as he paced, seeping into the earth. He then returned to the tub five more time, using each handful to paint one line of a five point star. Pentacle complete, he wiped his bloody hands on his shirt and went back into the larger pit to gather the rest of his supplies.

Five candles and five stones waited for him, in five colors each. He placed the candles at the tip of each star point, white-red-green-blue-black. The stones, onyx and jade and opal and quartz and aquamarine, he placed at the intersection of each line. Using a flint and tinder, as close to natural fire as he could get, he sparked a small flame and lit each candle. Once they were all lit the bloody lines seemed to light as well, flickering in time with the candle flames. Each stone seemed to gather the light in and exude it in a soft glow. 

Pleased with the outcome so far, Bill seated himself in front of the pentacle and began another chant. This one was longer, had stronger purpose. There were many sigils and wards and he had to maneuver carefully, cut them apart at their weakest, dismantle them piece by piece. 

The glow from the wall caught him off guard. He'd gotten so involved in the chant he'd gone on autopilot. His attention now fully back where it belonged, he focused on the wall as he continued the chant. 

The sigils surfaced one by one, until the dirt was webbed with glowing lines. One by one, the lines began to snip, began to snap, fall away, and the sigils flickered and lost their light. Behind them the wards appeared, larger and more solidly etched, but they fell apart as well.  
The wall shuddered as the magic fell from it, the dirt began crumbling. A hole appeared, widening as the magic continued to leech from it, until finally nothing was left.

The tunnel was open.

Eagerly, Bill climbed to his feet. The tunnel was dark beyond the reaches of the candlelight but it mattered little to him. With his demon sight active he could see the tunnel before him in dim relief. He entered it, cautiously putting out feelers, and headed down its length.

The tunnel twisted and turned a hit, but there was no doubt where it was heading. Bill found himself hurrying faster along despite himself - the portal room lay at the end!   
Bill wouldn't lie, while the journals (and the knowledge within them) were his ultimate goal, he was highly interested in the portal. He'd helped The Author with the basics of the theory behind it, but the man had cut him off, sent him back to the dreamscape, before the portal was built. A mechanical contraption built to mimic the portals demons used between worlds - Bill had always wondered, would it link the dreamscape to the real world? Could demon existance move from the metaphysical to the physical through it?

He'd always thought he could find the answer in the journals, in human mathematics and physics that interpreted their physical world in a much more coherent way than demonic physics. But if he could have time to inspect the portal itself, without being noticed...

If he was lucky, he'd catch them off guard. There might be no one at the portal, they might trust their sigils and wards well enough that they would not even think of an intrusion from this angle. The thought excited him, and he scurried down the tunnel towards his prize.

The passage ended at another dead end, but this one was mechanical, not magical. Squinting in the darkness, he noticed a lever to the side of the tunnel. He grabbed it and gave it a rug, and a grating sound of gears on gears reverberated from inside the wall in front of him.  
A sliver appeared at the center of the wall, then somewhat smoothly it grew as the two sides of a doorway slid apart. There was a dull brightness that reached him from a series of emergency lights scattered around the room, enough to see by well enough. Bill stepped inside the portal room and took in the sights.

The portal stood, massive and silent, to his right. He'd never been able to see it up close before. Oh, he'd tried, but by that point The Author had no longer been quite so naive. He'd placed wards, and though the potential power of the portal warped their working somewhat, it was enough to keep Bill decently far away.

But now, he could see it, take it in. It looked a little worn, wires hung out in places, and some of the offset platforms were entirely broken, but it was still magnificent to behold. There was a time when Bill would honestly have thought that humans would never be capable of building something like this. How the times had changed...

Someone cleared their throat, and it wasn't him. Perplexed and somewhat irritated that he'd been snuck up upon, Bill turned around.

"Uh, hey," said the large man standing behind him, holding something oddly bulky and  cylindrical in his arms.

Bill almost laughed. Question Mark? What was he doing there? And where had he been all this time?

He barely had time to finish the thought when the object in Question Mark's hands exploded in a burst of green powder, and something rammed Bill straight in the stomach hard enough to push him a step back.

Bill growled, looked down to inspect his body, only to find nothing there. No mark, no residue, nothing. He looked back at Question Mark to find the man giving him a curious and slightly worried look. Bill growled, which sent Question Mark back a step, but then the man's face hardened in resolve.

"What are you wai-"

Bill didn't get to finish his sentence. Something doubled him over, but he couldn't call it pain. Or could he? Was there a word to describe it? Cold fire, right in the gut, flickering needles throughout his rib cage, a gelatinous mass engulfing his lungs. He spat and growled, feeling his body grow cold as his eyes grew hot and hotter and they were flames but he could still see.   
"You're going to have to thank your cousins for us again," said a voice he knew too well.  
He looked up to see The Author walking out from a door set in the wall. Through the glass next to it, Bill could see The Hustler working some levers. A hum began to permeate the air, a glow grew behind him.

"You!" Bill spat, but that was all. The mass in his lungs was threatening to choke out his breath. He threw his hands out, blue flame flickering along the length of his arms towards his outstretched palms.

Question Mark jolted back, but The Author put a hand on his shoulder. Bill growled, but it was a pitiful growl. The flames flickered fitfully at his fingers, refusing to leave him refusing to grow.

His insides were rearranging in the most peculiar fashion.

"I was wondering what you were planning this time," The Author said, stepping forward. "Did you really think no one would've noticed how odd your host body was acting? The regular residents wouldn't have understood, but you must've known I would have. At first I couldn't figure out what you were doing, but I knew you were up to something. Then the tunnel leading from the diner flooded and set off my alarms, and I realized what you were up to."

Bill hissed as The Author stepped closer still. Behind him he could hear the hum increasing, feel an odd wind begin to blow as the light grew in intensity. The portal!

"And what now?" He chewed through the mass that was now in his throat. "You're going to throw me in to try to get rid of me? And what about this?"

He patted the body. The Author's eyes grew hard.

"That," The Author said carefully, "Is already dead, but you already knew that."

Bill attempted to flicker the flames again, but his power twisted all the wrong ways. He tried to focus on what was happening to him, to figure out what they had done. The feeling was alien, but he recognized the symptoms... The delivery was unorthodox, to say the least...  
He stumbled back, towards the portal, realizing what they had done. He could feel it, now that he recognized the magic - the burning fire, the twisting mass, all of it was the metaphysical pain that came with the solidification of his metaphysical body, it's unification with the human form he was in.

They were trying to trap him, here and now. He'd wondered if the portal was part of the plan, but now that he knew what they were up to, he realized it wasn't. It was broken, the hum and the lights only a distraction. They'd wanted him off kilter so that he wouldn't realize what was happening.

"How long do you think this spell will hold?" Bill asked with a wry grin, feeling somewhat more in control now that he'd figured that much out. "How long until I can break from these physical bonds and use my powers freely again? Hm?"

The Author stared at him, but said nothing.

"You think of everything, don't you? Trust no one, always one step ahead, expect the unexpected..." Bill laughed. He focused all his remaining free energy into the palms of his hands, focused until the flames leapt, until they burned more white than blue. "How much time do you give me?!"

He swung his arms towards The Author and Question Mark, the flames bursting forward viciously. They hadn't been expecting that, and he saw both of them jump away. 

Quickly, before they could regroup, he dashed back into the tunnel he'd come from. Above him and around him the sigils sang, and he fought the shielding of his powers, reached out with whatever he had left to snip the magical lines that webbed the tunnel ceiling. Dust sifted down as sigils flashed, and he barely outran the avalanche as the ceiling of the tunnel collapsed.

Breathing hard, he kept dashing, then jogging, then stumbling, the effort of using his magic as the shield came down on him almost too much. He was so weary, his human form so heavy, and his very atoms seemed to have turned to lead, turned to mercury, liquid yet so very dense, so weighted.

He fought with the magic that held him captive in the body, twitched against the bonds. They were strong; he could break them, but it would be a lengthy process, and first he would need to recover his strength. As it was, he could barely make himself walk. His breath came ragged, his muscles ached, he'd never known an experience like this inside a body. It was ridiculous.

The light of the outside world reached him, and he realized with a start that he'd managed to stumble back to the ramp. Good, he thought, and painfully scaled the ramp. At the top he rested in the silver light of the moon, struggling to catch his breath. The magic was still working inside him, twisting and turning and shuddering him down to the core of his being.

 Oh, he'd get them back for this, he thought with a pained chuckle. Oh, how he'd make them pay...


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What can I say? Sometimes, you're down and out. Sometimes, you're even downer and outer.
> 
> Come bug me at itsdetachable.tumblr.com, and check out the threepointplan tag on tumblr if you like.

The night was much too long. His affected eyes, no longer able to use demon sight, saw nothing. Everything was shades of black, edged with silver where the full moon’s light hit.

Then the clouds came.

Bill huddled in a doorway of a building for what seemed like ages, waiting out the darkness. His entire body ached with the pressure of containing his demon essence. He had no idea where he was; he'd stumbled down the hill and out from the cemetery half blind. He'd wanted to go home - his home? Carter's home? Did he have a home? - but his thoughts muddled and muddied, and he couldn't remember left from right or up from down. The cardinal directions abandoned him and it felt appropriate.

Now he had rested a bit, and though his limbs still shook he felt strong enough to move again. His head ached, but no longer enough to blind him with its pain. He pulled himself out of the doorway and back onto his feet. The clouds had moved on, and the moon once again edged the world in silver, painting the road so he could see where he walked. He recognized the buildings he passed somewhat, though they looked surreal and otherworldly tinted with pale light. He was in Gravity Falls, at least. For a wild moment during the darkness he'd entertained the thought that he'd stumbled straight into another world, one eerily similar to this one yet eerily different. Chuckles bubbled in his throat as he thought of it, it seemed so idiotic now. He couldn't stop the chuckles, they bubbled out of his throat and he couldn't be sure but they started to sound like sobs.

He was so tired, he needed rest.

He headed towards HIS house but he made it somewhere else entirely. The windows on the second floor were dark, but a light flickered inside one of the first floor rooms. A television, perhaps, with that odd-colored high rate flickering that made night look even deeper than it was. Someone was awake, so he stepped up to the door and knocked loudly. He could've rung the bell but that would have woken everyone and the thought of multiple people seeing him in the state he was in made him uneasy.

It was a long moment before he heard movement behind the door, long enough that he thought he would have to move on, but then the door opened.

Robbie stood in the space between the open door and the doorframe, looking somewhat inconvenienced and very, very wary.

"Hey," Bill said, as if he hadn't caused the kid bodily harm in the last twenty four hours.

For a moment Robbie didn't respond, just eyed him the way someone eyes a dog that might be rabid.

"Are you..." Robbie began, but then he paused, and seemed to choose his next words carefully. "Is... IT happening again?"

For a moment Bill was painfully confused; what was IT? But then he remembered Robbie wasn't speaking to HIM but to CARTER. 

"No," Bill replied. "I... I don't think so."

Robbie didn't look entirely convinced, and he was still blocking the way into the house. That wouldn't do. Bill put on his best pleading face.

"Can I come in? Just for a bit, I just need to rest a little," Bill attempted, hoping he sounded pitiful enough. He wrapped his arms around himself for added measure, "It got pretty cold out here."

His pity plea must've worked. Robbie's resolve seemed to falter, and his expression lost some of that cold wariness.

"Yeah, fine," The kid said finally, managing to sound wholly irritated, and stepped back to open the door fully. Bill stepped inside gratefully. 

The house was dark. Robbie led the way back to the living room.

"Is that one of those Japanese cartoon things?" Bill asked, falling into one of the overstuffed armchairs. Brightly colored characters with wild hair-dos were engaging in some sort of wild banter on screen. Robbie didn't respond, but quickly switched the channel to some sitcom rerun.

"You want anything?" Robbie asked, hovering uncertainly at the couch. Bill shook his head, just grateful he had somewhere to sit that wasn't hard concrete. His head was still spinning but at least he was getting his focus back. The bonds in his being itched but he wasn't ready to play with them yet. Just a little longer, he thought, stretching muscles cramped from the ache and the pressure. He curled up on the armchair, watching the images on the TV. Some human sitcoms could be mighty hilarious, and while he wasn't exactly into it he appreciated the laugh track.

Robbie had decided that he'd completed all required niceties, and had taken a seat on the couch. He didn't seem to care much for the sitcoms, looking somewhat bored as he watched the screen, and Bill wondered why he didn't just switch back to that Japanese cartoon. 

Bill found himself drifting off into a restless doze, the voices from the sitcom seeming somehow soothing despite their exaggerated tones and dialogue. He was in the dreamscape, yet somehow out of it. He could feel the weightlessness of his being, but it was anchored, and no matter how he struggled he could not move throughout the plane. Dreams surrounded him, familiar territories. He could see straight across the dreamscape at the dreams of the whole populace of Gravity Falls, but they might as well have been mirages on deserts sands for all the good it did him. He felt disconnected and aimless, he had a purpose in life but he couldn't find it any longer.

He growled in his sleep; the stupid Pines! He struggled but he was weak and the bonds were still strong, and the dreams hovered tantalizingly just beyond the tips of his ethereal fingers. 

To say it was torturous was beyond an understatement. He was getting no rest, everywhere he looked in the dream world he could only see limits where before there were none. This was his plane, his kingdom and his world and they'd taken it from him. For a short time, to be true, but they'd taken it. 

He whimpered, shifted on the armchair. He was awake again. Sleep clung to him, laying over him like a blanket but it was stifling and constrictive rather than comforting.

"You awake?" A hushed voice asked. Bill opened his eyes and uncurled slightly. He must really have fallen asleep.

"Yeah," He answered. Robbie was sprawled on the couch, looking just as bleary eyed as Bill felt.

"You wanna go see the sunrise?" Robbie asked.

No, Bill thought, I want to wallow in my misery some more.

But instead he stretched himself out and nodded. They got up, and Robbie led the way to the back of the house so they could face the east as the sun came up. 

It was close to dawn. Stepping outside Bill breathed in deeply, savoring the air. It tasted sweeter, for some reason. It reminded him of ether.

Above head he could still see pinpoint stars dotting the dark expanse, but further on the twilight of night was already giving way to the first shades of purple-blue on the eastern horizon. The colors seemed almost starkly surreal, otherworldly, above the black cut out of the forest.  
Robbie had headed out in front of him, and Bill hurried a few steps to catch up. He wanted ask him where they were goi–

He couldn't feel his legs, Bill realized as his steps faltered with a slight jerk. 

What an odd feeling. They were attached to his body but they felt no longer a   
part of him. 

Something detached from his back, rocking him off balance, and his useless legs gave way beneath him. He crumpled to the ground, surprised and dismayed. An ache was flickering to life in his lower back, pain flickered along his spine. He twisted on the ground, struggled to force his legs to work but his powers were hampered, and the nerves were fractured. 

With effort he managed to flip himself over so he could see around him. The sky was lightening but still a sickly purple. The stars were gone.

"Wendy..." Robbie whimpered from above him. Bill's vision fluttered in time with the pulsing pain in his spine, but he managed to maintain some sort of focus as he shot a glance around.

Wendy stood to the side, a determined look on her face. In her hands, a hatchet; on the hatchet's blade, blood. And possibly muscle. And definitely a tiny sliver of bone, stark white against the pink and red.

"Wendy, do it," Robbie's voice was hushed yet urgent. 

The redhead seemed to be gathering resolve, her hands gripping the hatchet handle so tightly it shook.

What are humans?! Bill thought with oddly detached dismay. He couldn't get his power to find the nerves, the veins, to stop the pain and stop the blood loss. His heart was pounding fiercely in his ears. There was fanatical laughter ringing in his ears but it was only inside his head because he couldn’t  gather breath for anything but a gasp.

"Do it!" 

"Shut up Robbie!"

Humans, what plan did they follow? What rules? Was all physical life so chaotic and unpredictable, so violent and rash? 

Bill had taken his share of lives, and he wouldn't deny it. Gloat about it, yes, profusely. Pain and loss and death were all mighty fine when they didn't pertain to him.

He'd never experienced bodily death before. He should embrace the experience, yet he knew the dangers it posed. If he didn't break his power free of the physical atoms of the body before the body died, he ran the risk of losing them to be scattered across the planes. If he wasn't fully himself before then, he would have no way of keeping himself whole. Bit by bit, as the body decayed, the power of his that was locked inside it would release. He wouldn't die, he was immortal!, but he'd be greatly weakened.

The thought frightened him as no other did. He'd worked too hard, for too long, to get where he was, and he was not going to allow the physical embodiment of chaotic existence that humans were to take that from him. 

He forced himself up a bit, supporting himself on his arms with great effort. The bottom half of his body was useless. The top half was beginning to truly feel the dull pain in his spine. His brain raced but it was a muddy, stuck-in-a-rut type of racing, constant left turns. He had to get away, he thought. He had to get away.

"Grab his arm," Wendy said. Something heavy fell to the earth with a thump. Bill hissed, but the kid grabbed him by his left arm, her hands gripping tightly.

Robbie didn't argue. He reached down, and though Bill struggled against Wendy's grip, he was unable to keep Robbie from grabbing his wrist.

"Where is it?" Robbie asked as they started to pull Bill along the ground. 

Their strength was uneven, and Bill's arms pulled at his shoulders painfully. He gasped in pain as the motion caused sharp stabs all up and down his spine. His legs still remained useless, dragging along the ground, though he fought to free some shred of magic, some tiny bit of power to get them moving again.

The spell was strong, and the bonds held. 

"It’s not far." Wendy said. 

Pain clouded Bill's mind, it was distorting his view. He struggled to remain cognizant.

"Are you sure this is going to work?"

"They said it would, ground to ground the demon power."

What were they talking about? Bill couldn't focus. The uneven ground was jarring his severed spine, and the resulting stabs of pain were threatening to black him out. The loss of blood wasn't helping; his body was feeling more and more numb by the moment.

"Almost there." 

Bill couldn't tell how long it was that they continued to drag him after those words. His being was tied to the body much too closely; the pain that the body experienced, the lightheadedness from lack of blood, the detachment, it all clouded his being and mind. This type of existence was horrid, he decided. Physicality was a Pandora's box of emotion and pain and confliction and he wanted nothing to do with it any more.

Thoughts of how he'd repay The Author and his little friends for this demeaning experience scuttled through his mind. The nightmares he'd conjure, the terrors, the traps and the constraints. Mindly matters belonged to HIM and he'd remind them of that. He'd been much too lackadaisical for much too long.

A jolt that signaled the end of their journey brought him out of pleasant thoughts of revenge.

"Ready?" Wendy asked, sounding out of breath. Bill struggled to focus his sight but before he could the two gave his arms a jerk, and suddenly he was falling.

It didn't last long. He hit damp earth with a thud, hard enough to pull a pained gasp out of him. He writhed in the ground, hands digging into soft soil. 

His sight was wavering, fluctuating, but he could make out what surrounded him - four walls of dark, damp earth. An earthworm wiggled a greeting at eye level on one side. 

Ground to ground the demon power. What was more physical than the earth itself?

Bill clawed at the earth frantically, struggling to pull himself upright somehow. He didn't want to be caught in the ground - it weighed down the weightless, it anchored the anchorless, it nullified demonness –

Stop it! He yelled at himself. His breath was hitching in time with the stabs of pain but he managed to get himself under control.

Old hexagon tales, a trapezoid's delusion - grounding was just a story, a legend, a myth young demons told each other. There was no truth to it, and Bill knew it. He reminded himself that he knew it. His base instincts (fears?) were surfacing in the light of his powerlessness, but he would persevere. There was no other choice.

He looked up, taking stock of his situation. They stood lined up along the edges of the vaguely rectangular hole in the ground he was in. The Author, The Hustler, Shooting Star and Pine Tree and Question Mark, and Wendy and Robbie. The first five had shovels in hand, the last two didn't. Aside from The Author and The Hustler all of then looked a little green around the gills.

Time to play on human emotions, Bill thought. 

"What... What are you doing?" He gasped. He didn't even have to fake the wobble in his voice. He looked desperately up at the faces ringing the hole. 

Shooting Star shot Pine Tree a questioning look. The kid looked a little shaken, but he shook his head resolutely in answer to his sister's unspoken question.

"Are you really going to..." Bill let his words trail off as he struggled to pull himself upright a bit. "Really?"

He was gasping at each breath now.

"You've locked my power away," He whimpered as pitifully as he could. "You've incapacitated me, this body... It's on its way out..."

He gestured as best he could to the walls surrounding him.

"This... Seems a little but like overkill, doesn't it?" He laughed but it turned into a choking cough halfway through. The body was really going downhill fast. 

He thought he hit some nerves; his vision really was getting shoddy, but he could see the indecision dancing across Shooting Star's face. She was such a soft hearted kid. Even Pine Tree was a bit shaken, lowering his shovel. 

Maybe, Bill thought, he could still get out of it. His pity plea had even Question Mark shooting uncomfortable glances towards the two older men at the head of the hole. 

A clump of dirt hit him right in the face. Bill shook it off, coughed because some of it had ended up in his mouth. Who...?

He looked up at the figures above to find Robbie glaring down at him, his hands dirty from the damp soil. Robbie. Bill wasn't quite sure what to do with the bitter emotion that suddenly woke inside him. He was quite pissed, but it was more than that.

He wasn't given time to consider it. Soil began raining down around him, the shovels digging into earth raising a chilling chorus. They worked in silence, ignoring Bill's renewed pleas, and the dirt piled up around him and over him and reached his neck. Bill gasped, staring up at the figures working feverishly above him. He almost felt proud of their callousness, their apathy, their sickening ingenuity. What were humans, indeed.

The sky above turned the most curious shade of rosy pink.

Then all was dark.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> OOPS! MY FINGERS SLIPPED AND ACCIDENTALLY A DEMON

Discombobulation mixed with detachment.

Bill had been picking at the strings that made the ropes that bound his being for so so long it seemed years had passed. His power slipped from between his fingers with each cell that rotted from his corpse prison. He'd picked at so many strings and lost so many snippets of his power. His self. His being.

Snippity-snip.

He was feeling himself again, but in a partial half-life sort of way. It was as if his arm and foot and part of his ribcage was floating while the rest of him lay dormant. No not ribcage. Bricks. A mosaic of bricks. Was his being bricks? Sometimes he seemed to forget.

Death, it turned out, was excruciating. A numbness of anti-being that nearly trumped his existence.

The bonds were not breaking fast enough for him. He hadn't expected that death would slow him down. He was surrounded by darkness and lived in darkness and darkness was his breath. 

He could burn the body, enough power had returned for that. He'd return to himself no worse than how he'd end up, anyway. But he had business to attend to, of the unfinished kind, which was of the important kind. Most important kind.

Finally, he twitched the body and it responded. It would do well enough.

With a jolt that set joints creaking he stirred and shifted and dug through dirt and stone until his hand broke free of ground and cool air grasped it in greeting.

He assumed it was cool air. His body was dead and there were only so many senses he would bother reawakening.

Getting out of dirt was more difficult than he had expected. Bill decided it was a good a time as any to test his powers. What was left of his powers. Flick the wrist, wiggle the fingers - the dirt lifted off of him and hovered overhead like a dark, dark cloud. 

He pulled himself out of the hole and let the cloud of dirt fall to the ground with a whumpf, like the exhale of a giant. Whumpf.

His head felt five kinds of wrong, only not wrong, exactly. Everything seemed three degrees away from him, things were slow motion and yet time moved just as it always had. 

Being trapped in a body that died with you in it, Bill decided, was much more irritating than possessing one that was already dead.

It was dark, night. The moon was up, but it had begun to wane. A couple of days and night had had to pass since he'd been put in a grave. No wonder his body's cells were dissolving. Now that his mind was no longer dulled and dismantled with pain, he could see where he had been dragged to. 

He had thought they might've taken him to the graveyard; it wasn't that far from the funeral home, after all, only down a road and up a hill.

Now that Bill could look around, he saw this wasn't the case. They'd dragged him to a copse of trees halfway up a hill and dug the hole among its roots. He eyed the trees curiously - why here? It was difficult to identify them in the dark, but he hissed when he finally did. Mountain Ash. It wasn't much of a threat for him personally, although no doubt it had added to the difficulty he had in breaking the bonds. Mountain Ash worked against many supernatural beings, as well as low power demons. 

Bill growled as he turned away and started down the hill. His body moved jerkily, until he remembered it was dead and he didn't need to try to control it with muscles and ligaments that were falling apart. Treating the body as a puppet instead made the going much easier. 

He'd had time to think on what he'd do when he finally got out again, when his power was once again available. He'd need the portal for what he had planned. It was broken, but even with a low level of power he should be able to activate it. They had trapped him in physicality, grounded him. He'd see how they like it when he returned the favor, reversed their polarity so to say. The thought of it brought a wicked smile to his face.  
There was business to take care of before he headed for the Mystery Shack, however. He couldn't see the path they had dragged him on but he didn't have to - the moon waned, but the sky was clear and the light glinted off of the roof and windows of the Valentino Funeral Home not far in the distance.

It didn't take long for him to reach the house. The windows were dark again, which meant it must've been late at night, and that worked well for Bill. Unsuspecting prey was the best.

He melted the handle and locks off of the back door, letting the molten brass drip down his hands and off of his fingers. He was quite pleased - he'd managed to save quite a bit of his power, and it was tantalizing, he wanted to start using it ALL again - but he had to restrain himself. 

Pushing the door open, he stepped lightly inside, shedding clumps of dirt as he went. There was barely a sound to be heard, but he heard what sounded like footsteps further inside. He had to walk down the hallway that led into the main house, and turn into the side hallway that connected the lower rooms. Yes, someone was awake, the light in the kitchen was on. He slid into a shadow near the head of the hallway where it connected with the stairs and waited to see who it was. No time to waste on collateral damage, no power to waste either.  
The light in the kitchen flicked off, and whoever was inside started walking back to the hallway. Bill's demon sight was back, and in the darkness he could see that the figure was Robbie, carrying a sandwich on a plate. Night time snack. Too bad, Bill thought, he wouldn't enjoy it.

The kid seemed to sense he wasn't alone. He stopped suddenly in the middle of the hallway, eyeing the darkness near the stairs uncertainly. Bill saved him the trouble, and stepped out from the deeper shadows. Moonlight shining through various windows lent enough light that Robbie could see him clearly then.

The kid was frozen, staring at Bill in disbelief.

"Hello Stitches," Bill said with a chuckle. His smile was threatening to burst at the seams again.

Robbie bolted. The plate clattered to the floor, the sandwich fell to pieces, and Robbie was running for the back stairs. Bill snarled, swung both arms out in an arc. Blue fire erupted along the walls, raced to pass Robbie and cut off his escape. Robbie skidded to a stop, slipped, fell, scrambled to get back up on his feet, and Bill took his leisurely time walking down the hallway through all of it, savoring the taste of unbridled fear.  
He reached Robbie just as the kid was getting back to his feet. He shied away, but Bill grabbed him by the back of his shirt, pulled him close.

"Do you remember your nightmares, Stitches?" Bill asked in a sickly sweet croon. "Because I do."

"No-"

Bill cut off his shout with a vicious twist of his shirt collar. Robbie fought frantically, but Bill had tossed bodily limits aside, and he hauled the struggling kid back down the hallway, around the bend, and down the second hallway. Robbie's cries were turning to breathless whimpers; Bill was making sure to allow him SOME breath. He didn't want the kid passing out, not yet. It'd ruin the fun.

Down the hallway, in through the cold door and into the colder room. 

"No no no please no..."

Robbie had started up a litany. It was music to Bills ears. He hummed a tune as he dragged the kid over to the metal doors on the metal wall. With a flick of a hand he opened a door, and unceremoniously dumped Robbie onto the metal tray inside. 

Another flick of the hand, and quickly. The kid had moved lightning fast but the door slammed shut in his face. Focusing, Bill sent his power out to seal all the doors on the wall, bright green light dancing allong the joints until they were welded shut.

Behind the door he stood in front of, Robbie's cries reached a frantic note.

Bill sighed, grinning to himself, and spinning round he leaned his back against the door. He allowed himself to awaken the sense of touch for a moment, savoring the feeling of Robbie's desperate blows against the door. His pleas and cries were reaching tones before unheard. Together with the thud of his blows, they made quite a gorgeous symphony.

The kid really WAS musically talented, Bill had to admit.

That, Bill thought as he left the house the way he had entered, was an entirely fulfilling detour. Thankfully, he hadn't wasted too much time, or power. The night was still dark and deep, and he could still move unseen through the town. He set off towards the Mystery Shack and used the time to pick away at more of the bonds. They were stubborn, like their maker, and more of the body was decaying slowly, but he was still able to unlock a few more bits of his power. All the more, all the better. 

The road to the shack was uneventful, the moon lit his way and the paths were empty. Yes detoured into the woods at one moment, avoiding a few cars that passed by, and even the nightly owls ceased their calls, watched him with shining eyes as he passed.

The windows of the shack were dark.

Bill reached out with his powers as he neared, looked through planes to find dreamers in the top rooms, and... Three dreamers in the living room. He didn't bother wasting time feeling out who was who - no one was in the shop and that was all that mattered. 

The locks on the door melted as easily as the ones on the Valentino's door, dripping down the painted wood in long rivulets. Bill pushed the door open slowly, and entered silently into the shop main. No sounds could be heard, so he stepped over to the vending machine.

He couldn't melt it out of the way. Moving it might cause a ruckus. He could float it out if the way, but he needed all the power he could spare for what followed. He'd have to risk it, he decided. 

There was a gap between the machine and the wall, and he fit his fingers behind it. Adding his demonic power to the half dead muscles of the body, he heaved and pulled the machine away from the wall. It swung out with a low groan, scraping against the floor. 

Behind the machine was a dark entrance, and steps leading towards the lower levels. Bill headed down them eagerly. At the bottom was a room with a window set in one wall, and a doorway next to it. Through the window he could see the portal standing silent in the darkness. It's potential energy, and the energy it had expended recently, still clung to it, affecting the physical plane, but it was only visible with Bill's demon sight. It was like an afterimage, a glow burned into the retinas, only on a multiplanar level.

There was a desk at the window, and an old fashioned computer terminal. A light on the screen had been glowing a sleepy green, but as Bill neared the light turned bright red, and the words "DEMONIC ENERGY DETECTED" flashed on-screen. It was setting off alarms, not doubt.

Good, Bill thought with a wicked grin. Let them come.

He opened the door that led to the portal and stepped into the main chamber. 

"What do you think you're doing?"

Bill hadn't heard anyone coming down the stairs, but he turned to find Pine Tree and Shooting Star in the room, and Wendy right behind them. They must've been the dreamers he noticed in the living room...

"You're here!" He said gleefully, spreading his arms in welcome. "Good!"

"Whatever you're thinking of doing, you better un-think it!" Shooting Star said angrily. She really was spunky, cotton candy that bit back.

"I can't," Bill said, grabbing his head dramatically. "Question Mark's spell trapped me in this body, and it trapped my thoughts too! I can't get rid of them!"

He followed that up with a bout of maniacal laughter.

"I should've cut your head off when I had the chance," Wendy said angrily.   
"You should've," Bill agreed, then shook his finger at her, chiding in a sing song voice, "But you didn't."

There was a clatter on the stairs - and the rest of the house's occupants came into view. The Hustler was first, followed by The Author, both of them holding something in their hands - The Author, a silver-bolt crossbow; The Hustler, a duct taped baseball bat.

"Glad you can join us!" Bill exclaimed, spreading his arms again. Now that they were all there, it was time to start. His smile widened as he pushed his power, flicked it through the floor and walls and ceiling until it encompassed the entire room. He saw it as a myriad threads spreading across the surface like a luminescent nervous network. The humans saw something as well, but only once the network had stretched to cover the doorway that led to the stairs.

"You're blocking us in?" The Author asked, eyeing the doorway grimly. He turned back to face Bill, crossbow at ready. "What do you think you can do here?"

"Not much, to be honest," Bill said with a shrug. It wasn't a lie - every time he used his power, cells in the body burst. Parts of his insides were liquefying as he stood there. 

"How can you use your powers again?" Pine Tree asked. The three kids had looked confused and surprised as the barrier rose, and they eyed Bill even more warily than before.

"I'll hand it to Question Mark, he blasts a good spell," Bill said, "but not good enough. Sure, it took a while, but snip went the bonds-" 

Bill pointed a finger at a large, loose piece of metal, and with a flick of his wrist sent it careening towards the humans. They jumped back as the metal crashed into the floor next to them.

"- and out came the power."

His voice had a definitive growl there towards the end. Using his power so freely was refreshing, was exhilarating! But he had limited resources, and not all of his power was free. Some of it was still trapped in the very cells that were liquefying moment by moment. He was going to sleep for quite a while....

First things first. He still had the energy to pull one last trick out of the top hat. 

"I know you're all just dying to find out why I'm here, in this room," Bill laughed, and his voice went deeper, that two toned echo coming out finally as his body's vocal cords finished disintegrating, "it's about time for the show to start!"

With a wild grin he spun around, whipping his arms up and out. Energy flowed out of him, seeped out of his body. The pressure of it opened wounds on his arms, on his face, weeping wounds that glistened with blue fire. 

He pushed the energy, all of it, into the pipes and the wires and the cords. All of it into the metal frame. All of into the silent, hulking behemoth of _potential_.

The portal creaked. It shifted. It groaned. Wind started up, fitful and chaotic. Objects jumped from the floor to ceiling, and back, and then back to ceiling again. 

Electricity raced from side to side within the circle of the portal, over and over, bolts of whitish blue, until suddenly, with a crack like a whip, the tiniest of fissures opened at the very center of the portal's circle. The fingers of electricity shot out again, seemed to grasp the edges of the fissure, and ever so slowly force it open.

Bill laughed through it all.

And the dreamscape moved closer.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full Notes at the end! Please don't miss them, they link to the next continuation in this series.

Gravity was beginning to reverse. The opening of the portal was pulling at the fabric of space time, and Bill could see tiny tears appearing in reality. Physical fabric ripped so easily.

"What are you doing?!" Pine Tree yelled.

"Me?" Bill said with sweet innocence. "I'm going home, Pine Tree."

Looking back over his shoulder, Bill saw the sweet look of panic on the human's faces. He savored the sight.

"You can't be thinking of... You don't have the power to control it! Not now," The Author pushed past the kids. "The portal is too damaged hold itself together - you know what could happen if it's power isn't contained!"

"Do I?" Bill wiggled an arm, watching gleefully as thick drops of coagulated blood dropped to the ground, rimmed with blue fire. 

"Bill!" The Author sounded desperate. He was beginning to float an inch or two off of the ground everything was. Bill found the return to weightlessness quite delightful.

"Maaaybbeee..." Bill grinned widely, "I don't want it contained! Hahahaha!"

The crossbow shot its silver bolt straight into his heart. 

It didn't matter much, the body was already dead. Bill poked at the protruding butt of the bolt, it stung his being a little, and looked at The Author. The man had a grim look on his face.

"Stan!" The Author yelled, turning round in the air.

"Already on it!" The Hustler had made his way to the computer terminal before the gravity had really begun fluctuating, and he was busy playing with the controls there.

What did he think he could do? Bill thought. He looked back at the portal, pleased to se the fissure had grown, the crack large enough now to show flashes of the dreamscape. Galaxies, nebulae, and then the colored vibrations and planar expanses, and a mess of other visions only he could see. 

"Oh no, we are NOT going to let you get away with - with whatever it is you're trying to get away with!" Shooting Star called out. Bill turned back to see the twins glaring at him with identical looks of fierce determination on their faces.

"This time, we're putting you down deeper than six feet," Wendy said, rolling up her sleeves and giving Bill a dirty look. She managed to look threatening despite floating a couple feet off the ground.

"Go ahead," Bill laughed. "Do you think you can get rid of me in time to stop that from opening any more?"

"Yeah, we do!" Pine Tree said with surprising conviction. 

"Get ready!" Wendy said, and grabbed both of the younger kids by the back of their shirts.

Bill watched, bemused. What were they thinking?

Wendy swung a little in the air, so that her boots met the wall, and with a push she launched the three of them towards Bill. The winds buffeted them somewhat, but thanks to the gravity fluctuations they were able to float quite quickly through the air. 

Bill chuckled at their ingenuity, and raised a barrier directly in front of himself.

"That's not going to work!" Pine Tree said, pulling something out of his pocket. He stretched his arm out, and as the object touched the barrier the near invisible shield cracked and fell apart.

"What?!" Bill backed up a step, but their momentum carried them straight to him. Both Pine Tree and Shooting Star collided with him, sending the three of them careening back, while Wendy bounced off and tumbled through the air. 

Bill crashed to the ground hard, and the two kids grabbed at him. 

"Ew, Bill!" Shooting Star made a disgusted noise as her hands slipped on the coagulated blood coating Bill's arm.

"I've got him, Mabel!" Pine Tree said, grabbing Bill by the front of his shirt and sitting on him, putting all his puny weight into it.

Bill growled, flaring his energy so that they shot up off the ground. The winds that were bursting fitfully buffeted them high into the air.

The portal was still opening slowly, and it was still draining power from him to do so. Bill winced, feeling the drain on his energy. He needed to get the humans off of him and refocus his powers if he wanted to keep his plan in motion.

"Get off!" Bill snarled, whipping the arm that Shooting Star was clinging to. Her fingers slipped, and she let out a frightened shriek, but she was a quick little bugger and managed to grab hold of his shirt.

"Give up Bill!" Pine Tree cried out, loosening one hand to ball it up into a fist. 

Bill laughed at the sight! It was too much.

"Go ahead, kid," Bill smiled maniacally. "This body doesn't feel pain anymore! Not that a punch from you would hurt in the first place..."

"Ahhh!" Pine Tree yelled and punched Bill in the face with all the energy he had in his bitty body.

As expected, it was like getting hit with a stuff wind. A little tiny stiff wind. Bill laughed uproariously.

"Mabel, now!" 

Oh, Shooting Star. Bill had forgotten she was still clinging to him. All three of them had been rotating slightly in midair as the gravitational force bickered with itself.  Shooting Star had somehow managed, despite the rotation and fickle gravity, to spider climbed her way onto his back, and now she pulled herself up to perch triumphantly on Bill's shoulders.

"On it, bro-bro!" Shooting Star dug under her sweater, that much Bill could see over his shoulder, but what was she pulling out?

Something bright and shiny dropped around his head, and Pine Tree let go of Bill to grab it. Once he had it, he gave Bill a push that sent him spinning in the air.

"Wheeee!" Shooting Star laughed as she rode on Bill's shoulders, round and round.

Bill was not quite that happy. His power reserves were getting low - the body was decomposing much too fast for him to recover the locked powers and replenish his reserves - and now the damn kids were toying with him.

He growled and fire flared up and down his arms. He'd burn them off! He flailed his arms, attempting to stop the rotation, and instead ended up entangling them in the bright length that Shooting Star had looped around him.

Pine Tree, in the meantime, had grabbed a loose end and used Bill's spinning to quickly and easily loop it around his bodies.

“Yeah, get ‘im kids!” The Hustler cheered.

"What are you two doing?!" The Author yelled from somewhere near a wall.

Good, Bill thought, at least he wasn't the only one puzzled by the turn of events. He glanced back at the portal, and saw that the fissure was barely any larger than it had been. Worse, the portal lights were beginning to flash - The Hustler must have been able to activate the machine, and if he got it running he could possibly nullify the power Bill had used to open the fissure.

Things were, unsurprisingly after the recent turn of events, not going according to plan. Bill was extremely tired of things not going according to plan. It seemed ever since the Pines had shown up in his life, nothing ever worked the way it should. It was almost enough to make a multidimensional interplanal demon want to retire to a dimension of pure energy for the rest of their relative existence.

Bill wasn't there yet, not by a long shot. He reached up and grabbed Shooting Star off of his shoulders, and launched her away from himself.

"Mabel!" Pine Tree called out; but there was a flash of plaid, and Shooting Star was plucked out of her trajectory moments before crashing into a wall. Wendy landed on the ground, holding Shooting Star, and gave Pine Tree a thumbs up.

"What were you thinking of doing with this?" Bill growled, picking at what he saw now was a length of silver chain. It stung, but this amount of silver wasn't much more than a nuisance. Even the silver bolt in his heart barely registered in his mind anymore.

Pine Tree wasn't playing attention to him; he was muttering something to himself. 

"Pine Tree!"

The kid looked at him then, fierce determination on his face. He gripped the silver chain and glared at Bill defiantly.

"Argentum vinculis his, Demon potentia perdidit!" 

Bill didn't know what Pine Tree said at first, but it was wrong. Very wrong.

The silver chain glowed white, it trembled, and then it began squeezing around him like a constrictor, wrapping tight into his skin.

Bill howled - there was PAIN! So much of it! - and forced as much power as he could out of himself in an attempt to free himself from the chain. Fire sputtered, wind burst in a cyclone around him, but neither the chain nor Pine Tree budged.

He didn't need to translate the Latin - he could feel what the chain was doing to him; confining him, again! Draining him! Weakening his grasp on his remaining power!

Bill growled, he could feel his eyes blazing. He glared at Pine Tree, and reached out to push him away. The only part of the kid he could reach properly was his head. The winds had blown the Pine Tree's hat off, and Bill's palm met the kid's forehead as he struggled to push him away.

"AhhhHHHH!" Pine Tree screamed, dropping the silver chain and grabbing Bill's arm.

Pine Tree was screaming. It took Bill a moment to realize that it was the kid, Pine Tree, that this kid was the one screaming. He couldn't fathom why - other than the silver chain burrowing into his body and being and causing waves of fire throughout his metaphysical self, Bill wasn't experiencing anything else. And Pine Tree was screaming, and clutching at Bill's hand, and attempting to tear it away from his head.

"Oh my gosh Dipper!" Shooting Star's voice echoed around them. The winds were dying as Bill's power diminished, and gravity was fluctuating in hiccups.

Bill huffed, trying to make some sense of the situation. Pine Tree was tugging at his hand, desperately trying to pull it off of him. Bill growled, and yanked back with his arm - and Pine Tree's head followed. The kid gave a yelp, and clawed at Bill's disintegrating arm.

Bill growled again, ready to use magic to blast the damn kid off of him if he had to. A tickle begun in his hand, and then on the back of his hand a light flared. A tiny light, like a glowing pin prick. Then another, an inch away, and another, until in a few seconds the glowing points of a constellation appeared on the back of his hand.

Pine Tree's birthmark! The Big Dipper shone on the skin of Bill's hand in little blue pinpricks, glowing with an entirely unnatural light.

As Bill watched. The skin of his hand began to disappear, it seemed, growing transparent, and then the muscles followed suit, so that it was pinpricks of light hovering over bone, beneath which he could see Pine Tree's forehead, his birthmark glowing an eerie red on his skin.

Then that disappeared too - not the birthmark, but Pine Tree's skin, then his skull seemed to turn transparent, so his brain and blood vessels stood out starkly gray and red. After a moment, they too changed, turned into transparent jelly. 

Through it all, the blue and red pin pricks of light, transposed over one other, continued to glow.

Deep, deep beyond the jelly of Pine Tree's brain new pin pricks of light appeared. They glowed the slightest blue-white. Around them was a field of further pin pricks - stars, Bill realized. He was seeing the actual star alignment, and the galaxial fields surrounding them. 

The stars pulsed, galactic light glittered in streams of dark matter and gases. It was beautiful. Bill hadn't visited the further reaches of the universe in such a long time...

Nostalgia was not what this vision was for, however. Something stirred behind the stars of the Big Dipper, something vast and dark. Tendrils of darkness spread around among the surrounding galaxial clouds, and the myriad stars dotting space behind the Big Dipper slowly vanished, swallowed by an unholy darkness.

A chill ran through Bill's being. He couldn't remember seeing anything like it before, but yet he remembered it. It was instinctual, maybe, some sort of special memory passed down through generations of demons.

How long had he, himself, existed, without knowing THAT?

And how long had THAT existed?

The darkness expanded, until all that was visible were the stars lighting the Big Dipper, burning in a field of empty black.

Bill wrenched his hand away from Pine Tree's head. The kid collapsed onto the ground, wheezing and clutching at his forehead. 

They were on the ground.

Bill struggled to stand up, and failed. Shooting Star and Wendy and the other ones were running up, calling Pine Tree's name. Bill saw the light of the Big Dipper superimposed on everything, pinpricks burned into his demon vision. His vision was wavering. He could barely get his body to twitch, to fidget. Where had all his power gone? The electricity from before had vanished, he no longer felt the crackle of the planar fissure. 

He'd wanted... He'd wanted to go home physically, to take as much of the physically trapped power back with him so he could mine it at his leisure... He'd wanted to take the Pines with him, to give them a taste of their own medicine... He'd wanted...

That darkness behind the stars returned to him, those tendrils across galaxies...

Bill couldn't focus. His mind was shot, as was the pitiful excuse for a body. He forced himself to stand - were the humans saying something to him? They were always talking, always the mouths and the tongues flapping their wind. They said his name as he rose, his name... A long piece of muscle slid off one of his arms and fell with a wet plop onto the floor. Bill laughed.

"So I think you're talking to me but I can't bother to pay attention right now," Bill said with a chuckle. He couldn't make out faces anymore, boy was he far gone. The physical world shifted in and out of focus, swirled like waves, melted together and reformed. 

"You may think you've won," Bill continued, wagging a finger in their general direction. "But this victory isn't yours, so don't get too happy. It might be mine! What a ride, humanity... What a ride..."

Another piece fell off his body, his abdomen? A thick piece of skin and meat that slid out from under his shirt and onto the floor. The oddest feeling of emptiness followed as the body's intestines spilled out in a mess of pinkish grey noodles the thickness of an arm, all ribbed and bulging and rubbery looking. Bill laughed again, and then laughed harder when the action caused the hanging loops to swing.

"And with that," Bill said, tipping a hat he most definitely was not wearing, "I bid you adieu."

He promptly fell flat on his face.

Or rather, the body did. Bill remained hanging in the air, back once again in his familiar triangular form. His edges were a bit hazy, and he was irked to find that he glitched somewhat as he floated. All fixable issues, with time. He'd never expected humans to be able to dismantle him quite like this, reduce his energy so greatly. Ah well, another note to add in his mental "HUMAN" notebook, if he could only find it.

He watched as the humans congregated around the body he'd left behind, still calling out to him. They looked distraught but relieved. The portal was closed, the danger was gone. 

Bill chuckled to himself; if they only knew! But that, THAT, was still far away, and he himself still had plans to set in motion. 

The next time, he thought to himself as he transposed planes and floated into the familiar reaches of the dreamscape; Oh, the fun they'd have, the next time!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the ride, it was quite fun! Bill is hellishly difficult to write, to be honest. I love it, though.  
> The next story is up and running! The title is A Shadow on Reality: http://archiveofourown.org/works/3829939/chapters/8541871
> 
> I hope you do continue reading and continue enjoying. Thank you!


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